Time for the confessional: When it comes to academic reading, record-keeping, and note-taking, I am a mess! When I find interesting articles online, I may save them to Instapaper for later reading, or if they come in pdf format, I may save them to Dropbox, send them to GoodReader on my iPad, or save a reference to Zotero with the tag “Read” (yea, right!). The result: a sizable Instapaper database, a mess of files in GoodReader, and random references in Zotero. The worst thing: I have a pretty bad memory, and if I don’t underline thoughtfully, take good notes, and use a well-organized database, I could just as well stop reading. So, over the last year I’ve been trying to come up with a way to keep track of academic readings, make note-taking more efficient, and be a bit more organized in my lit databases. It’s not necessarily the best way to do these things. There are other apps, tools, methods to keep track of reading (and read) materials, notes, and the like. But it works for me, and I’ve been able to keep it up for a while. Here’s what I do:
