Managing your information:a workshop for first-year Ph.D. students

Session 1

Emma Coonan

Cambridge University Library

Teresa’s approach

How do you:

1.Organise your literature?2.Decide a paper is worth reading?3.Know what is useful from that paper?4.Organise what you know?

Course content

• Session 1: managing found/published information

• Session 2: managing the information you generate

store – organise – retrieve – synthesize

Session content

• Information issues

• Literature searching and critical evaluation

• Active reading: skimming and tagging

• Storing your information

Information issues

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book”

~ Samuel Johnson

Your literature search

• Where did you look?

• What kind of search terms (search strategy) did you use?

• How satisfied were you with the number of results?

• How satisfied were you with the quality of your results?

Unknown unknowns

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

Step 1: Triage search results

Apply initial evaluation criteria:

• Date or currency

• Journal impact/quality

• Author

• Keywords in title/abstract

• Other … ?

Decide – keep or discard?

Step 2: Skim and scan

• Not possible to read everything

• To decide a paper is worth fully reading:

1. Skim abstract and introduction

2. Look at figures and tables

3. Read conclusions

Step 3: Keep a critical distance

• Be ruthless: ask “what’s in it for me?”

• Tag each paper with keywords that reflect the relevance it has for you

• Be alert to white rabbits!

Saving and storing your information

Saving and storing your information

Saving and storing your information

Saving and storing your information

Reference management software

Papers