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Organizing Papers and References without Losing your Mind

In January, Ulrike Träger wrote a great PLOS ECR post describing how to stay on top of reading during graduate school. If you haven’t read it yet, go take a look, as it’s relevant for people at all career stages. As a follow up, here are a few tips on how to keep track of the papers you want to read without losing your mind.

Choose a reference manager. Sure, you can get by creating a poster or two without a reference manager, but it’s incredibly risky to cite references by hand for manuscripts and grant proposals. Choosing and using a reference manager is also a great way to track papers as you collect them, particularly because reference managers often have powerful search functions. There are many to choose from. Some are free, like Zotero and some versions of Mendeley . Others, like Papers and EndNote , are not, though some paid programs may be free through your institution. Spend some time researching which manager fits your needs, but don’t get bogged down, you can always switch later. Personally, I have transferred references from RefWorks to Zotero to Mendeley to EndNote over the past several years without much trouble.

Choose a place to keep unread papers. Whether it’s a physical folder on your desk or a virtual folder on your desktop, it’s important to have a designated place for unread papers. This folder is more than just a storage space, it should also be a reminder for you to review unread papers. It’s tempting to download papers and forget about them, falling prey to PDF alibi syndrome , wherein you fool yourself into thinking that by downloading a paper you’ve somehow read it. So, set aside some time every few weeks (on your calendar if you need to) to review papers. You won’t necessarily read each paper in detail, but you should complete a quick skim and take a few notes. Try to resist the urge to leave notes like “finish reading later.” However, if needed, consider using notes like “need to read again before citing” for papers that were skimmed particularly quickly.

Choose how to keep track of your notes. It’s a great idea to create a summary of each paper as you read it, but where do you keep this information? Some people write separate documents for each paper (e.g., using the Rhetorical Précis Format ), others write nothing at all, but tag papers (virtually or physically) with key words. The exact components of your system matter less than having a system. Right now, I keep a running document with a few sentences about each paper I read. I also note whether I read it on paper or as a PDF so that I can find notes taken on the paper itself later. If I’m doing a deep read on a specific topic, I might also start another document that has in-depth summaries. I usually keep notes in Word documents, but it’s also possible to store these notes in many reference managers.

Choose how to file read papers. Again, having a system probably matters more than which system you choose. Given the interdisciplinary nature of science, it can be complex to file by topic. Therefore, I find it easiest to file papers by last name of the first author and the publication year. It’s also useful to include a few words in the file name that summarize its content. This will help you differentiate between articles written by authors with similar last names. So, for example, using this method, you might label this blog post as Breland_2017_tracking refs. I keep articles I’ve read in a folder labeled “Articles” that includes a folder for each letter of the alphabet. Therefore, I’d file this blog post in the “B” folder for Breland.

TL;DR. The goal of creating a system to organize papers and references is to be able to easily access them later. If you follow the steps above, it’s relatively easy to keep track of and use what you’ve read – if you want to find a paper, you can search for a key word in your reference manager and/or in your running document of article summaries and then find a copy of the paper in the appropriate alphabetized folder. That said, there is no right way to organize references and I’m curious about how others manage their files. Chime in through the comments and we’ll update the post with any interesting answers!

Pat Thomson (2015) PDF alibi syndrome , Patter blog. Accessed 2/27/17.

Ulrike Träger (2017) Ten tips to stay on top of your reading during grad school , PLoS ECR Community Blog.

Sample Rhetorical Précis: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/rhetorical-precis/sample/peirce_sample_precis_click.html

Featured image available through CC0 license.

[…] Organizing Papers And References Without Losing Your Mind – Jessica Breland […]

You have a great organizing skills! I appreciate your tips!

Fantastic tips! Thank you for sharing.

Great tips! It helps me a lot while I’m doing my final diploma project. Thank you.

This is great, very helpful. Nicely written and clearly organized [like your ref lib 😉 ] C

im at the start of my phd and already feeling that i have a lot of literature. i am taking your notes onboard and going to spend some time to organise my files asap. thanks

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15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research

How to stay organized when researching and writing papers

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Organizing research is important not only for your own sanity, but because when it comes time to unfold the data and put it to use, you want the process to go as smoothly as possible. This is where research organizers come in.

There are lots of free web-based organizers that you can use for any purpose. Maybe you're collecting interviews for a news story, digging up newspaper archives for a history project, or writing a research paper over a science topic. Research organizers are also helpful for staying productive and preparing for tests.

Regardless of the topic, when you have multiple sources of information and lots to comb through later, optimizing your workflow with a dedicated organizer is essential.

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Many of these tools provide unique features, so you might decide to use multiple resources simultaneously in whatever way suits your particular needs.

Research and Study

You need a place to gather the information you're finding. To avoid a cluttered space when collecting and organizing data, you can use a tool dedicated to research.

• Pocket : Save web pages to your online account to reference them again later. It's much tidier than bookmarks, and it can all be retrieved from the web or the Pocket mobile app .
• Mendeley : Organize papers and references, and generate citations and bibliographies.
• Quizlet : Learn vocabulary with these free online flashcards .
• Wikipedia : Find information on millions of different topics.
• Quora : This is a question and answer website where you can ask the community for help with any question.
• SparkNotes : Free online study guides on a wide variety of subjects, anything from famous literary works of the past century to the present day. 
• Zotero : Collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Lets you organize data into collections and search through them by adding tags to every source. This is a computer program, but there's a browser extension that helps you send data to it.
• Google Scholar : A simple way to search for scholarly literature on any subject.
• Diigo : Collect, share, and interact with information from anywhere on the web. It's all accessible through the browser extension and saved to your online account.
• GoConqr : Create flashcards, mind maps, notes, quizzes, and more to bridge the gap between your research and studying.

Writing Tools

Writing is the other half of a research paper, so you need somewhere useful to go to jot down notes, record information you might use in the final paper, create drafts, track sources, and finalize the paper.

• Web Page Sticky Notes : For Chrome users, this tool lets you place sticky notes on any web page as you do your research. There are tons of settings you can customize, they're backed up to your Google Drive account, and they're visible not only on each page you created them on but also on a single page from the extension's settings.
• Google Docs or Word Online : These are online word processors where you can write the entire research paper, organize lists, paste URLs, store off-hand notes, and more.
• Google Keep : This note-taking app and website catalogs notes within labels that make sense for your research. Access them from the web on any computer or from your mobile device. It supports collaborations, custom colors, images, drawings, and reminders.
• Yahoo Notepad : If you use Yahoo Mail , the notes area of your account is a great place to store text-based snippets for easy recall when you need them.
• Notion : Workflows, notes, and more, in a space where you can collaborate with others.

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Organizing Your Literature: Spreadsheet Style

By  Kathleen Clarke

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Kathleen Clarke is a Ph.D. candidate in Higher Education at the University of Toronto. You can follow her on Twitter @_KathleenClarke where she tweets about graduate education, mental health, and disability.

There are many different types of reference managers, including Refworks , Zotero , Endnote , and Mendeley . I’ve tried them all and none of have stuck. It’s not that there is anything wrong with them; I know folks who swear by them. They just don’t suit my workflow. Instead, I use a simple spreadsheet (Excel and/or Google Sheets) and a numbering format to keep track of all my resources. The best part about my system: it doesn’t require buying any software and it doesn’t take hours to learn!

The Major Spreadsheet

In her post called “ How I Use Excel to Manage My Literature Review ,” Elaine Campbell outlines her approach to using a spreadsheet to manage literature. I call her approach the Major Spreadsheet, because she is mapping out a very large body of literature for her doctorate in a single spreadsheet. I started a similar spreadsheet very early in my program. Here’s what it looks like:

What you want to do is add a bunch of column headings for things you want to keep track of and then start adding resources to each row. I initially was only adding journal articles, but realized this would work better if it truly housed all my resources. I therefore add anything related to my work: books, policies, blog posts.

Here are two pointers for your Major Spreadsheet:

First, start early and add often. I add to my Major Spreadsheet whenever I come across an article pertinent to my research area (graduate students with mental health challenges and disabilities). I started this in the first year of my program, so I have quite a few articles now. As Campbell points out in her post, this approach is great because it can help you see how far you’ve come and how much you’ve read.

Second, headings . The beautiful thing about workflow and organization is that there is no right way to do it; you can customize anything. The headings of your spreadsheet are where you can make this your own. In my spreadsheet, I have:

• ID number (I’ll come back to this)
• Author(s) + Year
• APA Reference
• Type of Resource
• Location (Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Other)
• Purpose/Objectives
• Research Questions
• Survey/Interview/Focus Group Questions
• Quantitative/Qualitative Design
• Main Findings
• Notes (where I put quotations I might want to use)

Some of these headings may not be of interest to you, but you are free to add any characteristic or metric you may want to use as a filter or sorting feature. These headings can change, too. As you go along you can add or remove as you see fit. You also want to think about the themes you might write about in your literature review. I, for example, have headings like: prevalence, stressors, depression, anxiety, suicide, accommodations, counseling, disclosure, faculty perceptions, and stigma. When an article I’m adding addresses one of these in a research question or as a finding, I add a little x in the cell to show that. Then, when I’m writing about that topic, I sort the column so that I can easily pull all the articles that address that theme.  

The Minor Spreadsheets

In addition to my Major Spreadsheet, I also developed what I call Minor Spreadsheets, which are similar to what Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega writes about in his post called Synthesizing different bodies of work in your literature review: The conceptual synthesis Excel dump technique . Minor Spreadsheets are much smaller than my Major Spreadsheet and have more specific details. I use Minor Spreadsheets in two different ways.

First, in the picture of my spreadsheets from above you’ll see at the bottom that I have different sheets within the same workbook. These are articles that could be related to other work I want to do. For example, I have a sheet about international students, where I track all the literature concerning international students’ mental health. I also have a sheet with cool studies that I want to come back to later (because who said reviewing literature can’t be fun?). I add to these sheets on an ongoing basis to save me time later.

The second way I use Minor Spreadsheets is when I start a new paper. I pull articles from my Major Spreadsheet and throw them in a new one. Now that I have an existing foundation for the literature, I can go to Google Scholar to build on what I already have instead of starting from scratch.  

These Minor Spreadsheets are typically much more focused than my Major Spreadsheet. For example, in the Major Spreadsheet I use the x to identify articles under one overarching disability theme and in the Minor Spreadsheet I take all these and look more closely at type of disability, level of education, and accommodations.

The Number System

Now, lots of folks would use the spreadsheet approach and then store their articles with annotations in another program. Instead, I include a number system that allows me to easily find any article from my Major/Minor Spreadsheets from a regular folder in my Documents (Shout out to Jeff Burrow for introducing me to this method). If you look back at the screenshot I provided earlier, you’ll see that there is a column called ID Number. Every article I add to my Major or Minor Spreadsheets gets an ID number. I then have a folder for my Major Spreadsheet and all its articles.

My folder for my Major Spreadsheet looks like this:

Everything is nice and clean with the numbers, but it doesn’t always look like this. Here’s an example of what one of my Minor Spreadsheets, Canadian articles, looks like:

For my Minor Spreadsheets, I typically start by copying and pasting articles from the Major Spreadsheet and the folder of articles. This is why you end up with folders for Minor Spreadsheets where the numbers are all over the place, which is okay. The numbers don’t mean anything; it’s just an easy way to find articles other than using author name(s) and article titles.  

A final note: I number dissertations differently than other pieces. I started numbering those at 1000 and have gone up from there. I wanted to differentiate dissertations in some way so that I could easily find them in my folders (usually because I look at dissertations to see how others have done certain things). You could also differentiate other pieces in your folder like books, by starting at 2000, for example. Again, you can customize all of this to what works for you.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this spreadsheet approach and to also know what other methods you might be using to organize your literature. Do you think the spreadsheet approach would work for you? What other methods do you use to organize your literature review work?

[Image by Flickr user Craig Chew-Moulding and used under Creative Commons licensing.]

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How to Manage Research Papers: A Cheat Sheet for Graduate Students

• August 1, 2022
• PRODUCTIVITY

Often, researchers find themselves overwhelmed by the vast number of papers they have to read and keep track of.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that we are not using existing tools and services to make our lives easier by managing research papers. In addition, it’s hard to find a versatile product that meets all our needs under one interface, but that is a topic for another post.

Our search for the best research paper management system might not be as straightforward as we think.

Manage research papers is an art that can be developed over time, starting with some handy resources.

Here are some tools I use to keep track of my favorite research papers and also keep up to date with the latest studies.

The main focus of this blog post will be on consumption (rather than writing), and I will cover:

Managing the input

Managing the process, managing the output.

Choose a place to keep unread papers.

Some people like printing papers and some don’t, and that’s okay! I used to print relevant papers for my research that I found interesting.

In the long run, printing all the papers might be overwhelming.

A designated place for unread papers is important, whether a physical folder on your desk or a virtual folder on your desktop.

The folder should serve more than just as a storage area; it should also be a reminder to read your unread papers. You may be tempted to download papers and forget about them, falling victim to PDF alibi syndrome , whereby you fool yourself into thinking you’ve read them.

So, schedule time to review papers every few weeks (on your calendar if necessary). A quick skim and a few notes are all you need to do. You won’t necessarily read each paper in detail.

Avoid the temptation to leave notes like “finish reading later.” However, if necessary, consider using notes like “need to read again before citing” for papers that were skimmed too quickly.

TIP: In case you don’t want to download the papers or have a file system like the one described above, try using an internet plugin such as “ MyMind “. You can sort your files, color code them and use tags.

Choose a reference manager.

An automated system will save a great deal of time in manuscript preparation if you are still manually formatting your references.

I downloaded all the research papers that interested me in the past, but now I realize that’s a bad idea. In addition to not reading even 10 percent of those papers, they also took up a lot of space and were messy without adding anything to my knowledge. I could have sorted the papers properly with a system after downloading them.

A little research led me to a solution.

While taking an online course, I heard about the reference manager, Zotero . I have been using Mendeley, but Zotero has some interesting features that I enjoy. One of these reasons is linking notes with Obsidian (which is my primary note-taking app).

As a result, I started using Zotero , and managing research papers has never been easier.

It is possible to create a poster or two without a reference manager, but citing references by hand for manuscripts and grants is extremely risky.

You can also track papers as you collect them by using a reference manager, especially since most reference managers offer powerful search functions. There are many options to choose from.

In addition to Zotero , Mendeley could be a good alternative. These two reference managers are both free. Several paid software may be free through your institution, including Papers and EndNote .

Take your time to choose the research paper manager that suits your needs, but don’t get overwhelmed. If you decide to switch later, you can always do so. Over the past several years, I have successfully transferred references from RefWorks to Mendeley to Zotero.

A reference-management tool such as Zotero, Mendeley, or Endnote helps you create lists of references, store them, and organize them in a database of folders, keywords, and tags. A browser plugin is available for saving a paper with a single click, and a word processor plugin is available for creating bibliographies and adding in-text citations.

Whenever I find a paper I’m interested in reading; I add it immediately to my reference manager. Once it’s safely stored, I can close the browser tab, knowing it’s easily accessible in the future.

TIP: It might be better to add papers to your reference manager through their web plugin rather than manually (by downloading a .pdf file) since manually adding them might not update all the necessary metadata.

Choose how to keep track of your notes.

Writing a summary of each paper as you read it is a great idea, but where do you store it?

Keeping track of your thoughts on papers you read is one of the most important aspects of managing research papers.

It is common for people to write separate documents for each paper, while others don’t write anything at all but simply tag papers (either virtually or physically) with keywords.

In the past, I kept a running a document with a few sentences about each paper I read.

However, this workflow can sometimes be overwhelming.

I’ve realized I was spending more time managing research papers than reading them. For me, it was not a very constructive methodology.

I wanted to use the most straightforward research paper managing system to store my output, so I took notes directly in my reference manager (Zotero has an in-built PDF reader for taking notes).

The annotations I take are extracted into a new file and kept in the same location as the paper.

Later, I extracted these notes to my primary note-taking app, Obsidian , and made some additional notes there.

Choose how to file papers.

The importance of having a system probably outweighs the importance of choosing a system.

But, no matter the system you have, it would be better to file the papers properly.

It can be difficult to file by topic due to the interdisciplinary nature of science.

The best thing to do would be to develop a file name system (per each .pdf file). However, if you had to do it manually, you might only do it for the first few papers. Therefore, you may need to automate the file renaming process.

I use the Zotero plugin “ Zotfile .” to do this task.

By using research paper information, you can name a file. Using the first author’s name, the year the article was published, and the first three words of the article title, you might name the file “ azamSelectiveProbingThinFilm2019 “(first author first name: Azam, first three words of the title: Selective Probing ThinFilm, year of publication: 2019).

Alternatively, you can use Zotero’s “ Citekey ” feature to generate a filename.

Final words

It is important to create a system to manage research papers so that they can be easily accessed in the future. You can easily keep track of what you’ve read if you follow the steps above.

However, there is no “one” right way to manage research papers, and I’m curious about how others do it. Feel free to comment, and we will update the post with any interesting responses!

This is the second post of the four-part blog series:  The Bulletproof Literature Management System . Follow the links below to read the other posts in the series:

• How to How to find Research Papers
• How to Manage Research Papers (You are here)
• How to Read Research Papers
• How to Organize Research Papers

Images courtesy : Phase vector created by new7ducks – www.freepik.com , Creative process vector created by storyset – www.freepik.com

Aruna Kumarasiri

Founder at Proactive Grad, Materials Engineer, Researcher, and turned author. In 2019, he started his professional carrier as a materials engineer with the continuation of his research studies. His exposure to both academic and industrial worlds has provided many opportunities for him to give back to young professionals.

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Research Voyage

Research Tips and Infromation

How to Effectively Organize your Research Articles on your System

Importance of Organizing Research Articles

Brief overview of the article, create a folder structure, use file naming conventions, utilize metadata and tags, backup and sync files, use a reference management software, regularly review and update folder structure, keep related articles together, adding meta description, introduction.

In today’s fast-paced environment, research and knowledge are constantly produced at an exponential rate. When there is so much information to keep track of, the organization may be a challenge. A system for efficiently managing, storing, and retrieving academics’ and researchers’ papers and research materials is essential. By doing this, you not only save time but also ensure that you never lose track of important information and discoveries.

This article will discuss how to organize your research papers on a computer, providing you with step-by-step instructions and suggestions to keep everything organized and easy to discover.

This article’s information and suggestions will give you the methods and tools you need to efficiently manage and arrange your research articles, whether you’re a student, academician or researcher. So let’s get going.

The organization of the research articles is a critical phase in the study procedure. A well-organized research library guarantees that you never overlook important findings or miss important information in addition to saving you time and effort. Research articles are the cornerstones of your career and the source of original ideas and discoveries. When your articles are arranged correctly, you can quickly and easily retrieve the information you need, utilize it as a source in your writing, and expand on it in future pieces.

In this post, you will learn in detail how to arrange your research articles on your desktop. You will learn how to back up and sync your files, use metadata and tags, use file naming conventions, and organize your files into folders. We’ll also cover how to use reference management software and regularly update your folder structure as well as how to keep your research papers organized. By the time you finish reading this article, you will be familiar with all the techniques and resources needed to effectively organize and manage your research papers.

Steps to Organize Research Articles on Desktop

• Main Folder for All Research Articles : Start by creating a main folder that will serve as the home for all your research articles. You can name this folder something like “Research Articles” or “My Library.” This will provide a centralized location for all of your research materials, making it easy to find what you need.
• Sub-Folders for Each Topic or Project : Next, create sub-folders within the main folder to categorize your research articles by topic or project. For example, you might have sub-folders for “My Papers” as “2010, 2011 etc ” or “Author1, Author2.” This helps to keep related articles together and makes it easier to find what you’re looking for.
• Identical and Detailed File Names : Utilizing a standardized and informative file naming strategy is crucial when archiving your research publications. Use a format like “Author Last Name – Article Title,” for instance. This helps to guarantee that the file names are distinctive and descriptive while also making it simpler to find the items you need quickly.
• Make use of keywords in file names : It’s beneficial to add pertinent keywords to the file names in addition to using descriptive file names. You might include “Machine Learning” in the file name if the article is on machine learning, for instance. This makes it simpler to look up and locate particular articles based on the subjects they cover.

• Add Relevant Information to the File Properties : Adding relevant information to the file properties, such as the author, date, and publication information, can help you quickly identify and categorize your research articles. This information is often included in the metadata of the file, which can be accessed by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”
• Use Tags to Categorize and Search for Articles Easily : Using tags to categorize and search for your research articles can also be a helpful tool. For example, you might add tags like “Computer Science,” “Machine Learning,” or “History.” This allows you to quickly find articles based on the topics they cover, even if they are stored in different folders.
• Importance of Backup : Backing up your research articles is an important step in the process of organizing your files. This ensures that you will not lose your research materials in the event of a technical issue, such as a computer crash or data loss.
• Options for Backup and Syncing (e.g. Cloud Storage) : There are several options for backing up and syncing your research articles, including cloud storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox. These services allow you to store your files in the cloud and access them from anywhere, providing an extra layer of protection and ensuring that your research materials are always safe and accessible.

Tips for Keeping Research Articles Organized

• Reference management software is a tool that can help you manage and organize your research articles and citations. These programs provide a centralized location for your research materials, making it easy to store, manage, and retrieve your articles and information.
• One popular example of reference management software is Mendeley . Mendeley allows you to store and organize your research articles, add notes and annotations, and create bibliographies in a variety of formats. It also includes a desktop application and a web-based interface, allowing you to access your research materials from anywhere.

You can visit my article on How Mendeley Reference Management Software makes Researcher’s Life Easy? . The article will help you in organizing your research articles in an optimal way.

• It’s important to regularly review and update your folder structure to ensure that your research articles are properly organized and easily accessible. This will help you identify any areas where your folder structure may be lacking, or where additional sub-folders may be needed.
• A good practice is to review your folder structure at least once a quarter, or as needed. During this review, you can assess your folder structure and make any necessary updates to ensure that your research articles are properly categorized and organized. You may also want to consider regularly reviewing the metadata and tags associated with your files to ensure that they are up-to-date and relevant.
• Project-wise : Let’s say you are working on a research project about the impacts of climate change on coastal ecosystems. To organize your papers project-wise, you could create a folder for your climate change project and sub-folders for each aspect of the research, such as “Sea Level Rise,” “Ocean Acidification,” and “Coastal Ecosystems.” Within each sub-folder, you can store your research articles, notes, and any other related materials.
• Methodology-wise : If you are interested in exploring different research methods, you could create a folder for each method, such as “Quantitative Research,” “Qualitative Research,” and “Mixed Methods.” Within each folder, you can store papers that discuss or use that particular method, making it easy to compare and contrast the different approaches.
• Keyword-wise : If you are exploring a specific topic, such as “Artificial Intelligence,” you could create a folder with that keyword and store all of the articles, papers, and other materials related to the topic. This method allows you to quickly find all of the information you have related to a particular topic, making it easier to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest developments in the field.
• Format-wise : If you have a mix of different types of research materials, such as articles, conference papers, and book chapters, you could create folders for each format and store your materials accordingly. For example, you could create folders for “Articles,” “Conference Papers,” and “Book Chapters,” and store your materials in the appropriate folder. This method allows you to quickly find the type of information you need, regardless of the format in which it is stored.

These are just a few examples of the different methods for organizing research papers. The best method for you will depend on your research needs and preferences, and you may find it useful to use a combination of methods, depending on your research needs.

Adding meta descriptions to your folders can help you quickly understand what each folder contains and why it is important. Here’s how to add a meta description to a folder:

• Create a text file or Excel file: In the same folder, you want to add a description, create a new text file or Excel file. You can name this file “Description” or “Meta Description.”
• Write a brief summary: In the text/Excel file, write a brief summary of the contents of the folder and its purpose. For example, if you have a folder for “Articles” you might write “This folder contains all of my research articles on the topic of X.”
• Save the file: Save the text/Excel file with the description in the same folder that you want to describe.

Note: The process for adding a meta description will vary depending on the operating system and file management software you are using. However, the general principle of creating a text/Excel file with a brief summary remains the same.

By adding meta descriptions to your folders, you can quickly understand the contents of each folder and why it is important. This can save you time and help you stay organized as you work on your research.

To remain effective and productive as a researcher, it’s crucial to organize research articles on your desktop computer. You may quickly discover the information you need by using one of the various organizing techniques covered in this article, whether your search is project-, methodology-, keyword-, or format-based. Additionally, by including meta descriptions in your folders, you can save time and stay organized by understanding quickly what each folder includes and why it’s important. Organizing your research articles is crucial for staying on top of your work and making the most of your research efforts, whether you are a student, academic, or professional.

By taking the time to organize your research articles, you can streamline your workflow, stay informed about the latest developments in your field, and ultimately, make the most of your research efforts.

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Work hack: How to organize your research literature – and make it sharable

A must-have strategy for fieldwork.

Credit: cifotart/Getty Images

17 July 2020

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The amount of literature researchers are expected to stay abreast of can be overwhelming so it’s vital to have a system that allows documents and images to be stored, recalled, and easily shared.

This is particularly true for researchers who conduct fieldwork and need to access information on the fly.

For PhD candidate, Yi-Kai Tea, a taxonomist and systematist at the University of Sydney in Australia, setting up a cloud-based system early on in his career was one of the most important things he did.

“The more you read, the more familiar you are with the field and the groups you’re working with,” says Tea. “I keep my literature very well sorted because it’s so important.”

Tea specializes in describing and naming new species of coral reef fishes. He’s particularly interested in fairy wrasses, and was responsible for naming a new species last year , Cirrhilabrus wakanda , inspired by the Marvel film Black Panther .

“It’s hard to do this kind of work by yourself because of the sheer number of species out there. I work collaboratively with a lot of fish enthusiasts, scientists, and collectors who go out in the field and send information to me,” says Tea.

How do your Google Drive and Dropbox systems work?

I have an account where I put in everything that’s related to fairy wrasses: every single species description that’s been written about them since the 1800s, every single colour photo, distribution map, vectors, diagrams - everything you can think of that might be relevant to this group. I maintain a well-curated folder that can be accessed online.

I’ve also have decked it out so I can access the most important files offline.

I share it with any collaborators that I’m working with now or might be working with in the future, so they can access it in the field. It helps with my research as well, to have all these papers at my disposal. It’s my own personal library.

How did you set it up?

I’ve been filling it in over a number of years. Some of the literature is hard to find – a lot of the original descriptions are in manuscript form, and some of them haven’t been published, so to get these, you need to go to the museums and libraries and photocopy them, scan them, make pdfs, and upload them.

It took a while to track down all the literature and species descriptions, but once you have it, you have it forever and can keep curating it. I save every PDF that I download. I keep it in a folder, name it, and order it by author and by date. I follow this system quite religiously.

What web resources do you use to source your literature?

Some of the old manuscripts I need to access are archived in online repositories such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library , so having this link saved in my tabs is a really useful tool.

Other important web resources I use a lot are Eshmeyer's Catalogue of Fishes hosted by the California Academy of Sciences, and iNaturalist , a catalogue that keeps a pretty up-to-date record of all species, complete with references.

iNaturalist is a fantastic resource to search for in-situ photos of whatever taxon you might be interested in. I often seek out photographers from iNaturalist who are willing to contribute photos I may need for my research. Many of them are very willing, or may already have photos up that are free for use.

How do you organize your own data in the field?

I have ready-made excel spreadsheets with standardized columns containing anatomical features that I need to measure. I then modify it slightly to accommodate whatever taxon I happen to be working on.

I do same for manuscripts – I have a basic skeleton written for diagnoses and descriptions, with placeholder symbols where values would eventually go.

A lot of taxonomic papers follow a consistent and ‘tried and tested’ formula, so this works very well, especially for fairy wrasses, where most of the methodology and description follow previous papers that I've published.

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Organizing Research Papers: A Step-by-Step Guide

Writing research papers can be an arduous task, especially when it comes to organizing the materials needed for a successful paper. In order to simplify this process, this article will provide a step-by-step guide on how to effectively organize your research papers. It will discuss topics such as where and how to store information, proper citing practices, effective note taking strategies and more in depth guidance that is essential for producing quality work. By following these instructions you will not only save time but also produce better results from your efforts in writing comprehensive research papers.

I. Introduction to Organizing Research Papers

Ii. benefits of an effective research paper organization system.

• III. Creating a Research Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide

Getting into the right mindset to read scientific papers quickly:

Before you start anything, you need to isolate your singular goal for reading papers in the first place. Otherwise, you’ll be passively reading every paper that comes up rather than hunting for specific details. Don’t be a forager, consuming anything edible that crosses your path. Be a hunter: have a specific target that keeps you selective, efficient, and guides every step you take.

Most of these tips are designed to help you focus on extracting value efficiently so you won’t give up after two papers! So, what is your goal here? Is it:

• Getting a solid foundation in your field?
• Collecting the newest research for a cutting-edge literature review?
• Finding ideas and inspiration to further your own research?  

I’ll be honest here: The first dozen papers of a new subject will be a grind. But it gets easier, I promise! When you find yourself blasting through the “template” introduction and recognizing citations you’ve already read, you know you’re close to being an expert. At this point, if you’re struggling to understand a new paper in the field, it’s likely the authors’ fault, not yours. 

Keep in mind that academics aren’t exactly known for concise writing. Practice skimming paragraphs for high-value verbs, numerical values and claims. Skip over wordy low-value prose like “We thus appear to have potentially demonstrated a novel and eco-friendly synthesis method for…” It’s easy to fall back to a casual fiction-reading mentality. Try to stay in a high-energy search mode and you’ll be effectively done in half the time.

Later on I’ll reference our journal article notes template , which I used to synthesize notes for my literature review. Go ahead now and open it in Google Drive where you can download and edit it for free. We just ask that you drop your email so that we can stay in touch on new helpful resources and awesome new tools for scientists.

How do you read scientific papers effectively?

Below are my tips for how to read scientific papers most effectively. I used this methodology to write a critical literature review in a brand new field in about 4 months, citing over 150 papers. My first-author paper now has nearly 1000 citations in only six years since publication, making it my advisor’s most highly-cited paper in his 30-year career! You can do this. Just keep reading: 

1. Briefly read the Abstract

The abstract is your most condensed look at the paper. Read it quickly and highlight any claims or phrases that you want more details on. I like to copy the entire abstract text or screenshot into the journal article notes template for later reference. It also helps to copy the keyword text into the template or your citation manager tags so you can search for them later. Things to read for:

• Is the research applicable to what you need right now?
• Are the findings significant enough to help you with your goal?
• What is the most interesting aspect of this paper?

2. Carefully read the Conclusion

Reading the conclusion gives you an instant look at the quality of the paper. Do the authors seem to make claims bigger than appropriate for the scope of the paper? Do they use hyperbole to inflate the importance of the work? Are the results not clearly stated? These could be red flags identifying a poor quality paper. 

Highlight and copy a few of the most important phrases or sentences out of the conclusion into the journal article template in the first bulleted section or into the notes section of your reference manager. Look for:

• What the authors think they accomplished in this work.
• The reasoning behind their results. Any useful insights?
• Ideas for future experiments.  

3. Identify the most important figures and dig through the Results & Discussion for more detail

If you’re still interested after the first two steps, start digging into the results and discussion for more details. Before making the deep dive, write down the specific questions you need to answer in your notes section. Search the paper for those answers, writing down new questions as they come to mind. 

One favorite strategy here is to look at each figure, read the caption and then dig through the text for supporting information (use Ctrl+F for “Fig. 3”, for example). The figures should tell the story as well as (and more quickly than) the text. 

Copy and paste specific claims you may want to quote or paraphrase later. Isolate what the authors think they did from your own commentary and summarize it in your own words.

4. Search the Methods section to answer questions if necessary

The Methods section is usually the most tedious and tiring to read. That’s why we don’t do it first. Only go through it when necessary or you’ll never get to the 100 other papers you just downloaded.

Go back through the Methods when:

• This paper showed a different result than another similar paper, and the methods may have caused the difference. 
• You’re sure you want to include the paper and you want to be critical of the way they conducted their experiments. 
• You may want to replicate their experiment in your own work.

Make sure to note anything unique, odd, or unexpected in their methods. Maybe it will lead to a breakthrough in your own work or help explain a surprise result!

5. Summarize your thoughts and critiques

Re-read your notes so far to check for any missed questions. Go back and extract sentences or paragraphs of the paper that you want to challenge so you can quickly find them verbatim. Write your own thoughts and questions around those topics so you can copy them into your literature review later. Ideas for notes:

• What would you have done differently in the experiment or data analysis?
• Is there an obvious gap or follow-up experiment?
• Does this paper uniquely contribute to the field’s body of knowledge? What is its contribution?

6. Copy important figures into your notes

This is the most important step but many don’t do this. Figures are the anchors of every good journal article and the authors who spend the most time making excellent figures also will get cited the most often in review papers. This leads to even more citations from experimental articles. My secret for getting the most citations of my review paper was to spend more time than typical finding or creating the best possible figures for explaining the content. You can do this too, it just takes time!

The best reference manager Zotero doesn’t have an “add image” button in the “Notes” section but you can actually screenshot the image with the Snipping Tool then Ctrl+v paste it into the notes section! Now when you come back to the paper you’ll get an instant look at the most significant figures. If you know you want to use one of these figures in your review, add a tag to the paper like “Figure Rev. Paper 1”.

7. Pick important references (especially review papers) out of the Introduction and Discussion

Now that you have a good understanding of the paper, it’s time to start tidying things up and thinking of where to go next. Skim the introduction for helpful references or check the first 5-10 listed in the References section to find mostly review papers you can use for new leads. Go and download these into an “Unread review papers” folder in your citation manager for when you get stuck later. 

Then, go to the journal/library website and check for new papers that have cited this paper. This will help you follow the trail of a specific research topic to see how it’s developing. Download the interesting ones and put them in an “unread” folder for this very specific research topic. In Zotero, you can even tag the paper as “related” to the current paper for quick access later.  

8. Clean up the metadata if you plan on citing this paper later

If there’s a chance you’ll cite this paper later, make sure to clean up the metadata so your word processor citation plugin creates a clean reference section. Author initials may be backward, special characters in the title may be corrupted, the year or issue of the journal could be missing or the “type” of citation could be wrong (listed as a book instead of journal article) which would change the format.

Fully tag the paper using whatever system you’ve come up with. Keywords, chemicals, characterization methods or annotation tags like “Best” can all be useful. One other trick I used was to come up with an acronym for the paper I was about to write - “NMOBH” for example - and use that as a tag in any paper that I planned to cite later.

Being methodical in your post-read organization will save you many hours and endless frustration later on. Follow these tips on how to organize your research papers and you’ll be a pro in no time. You’re almost done, but don’t skip this part!

9. Take a break, then repeat!

This methodology makes it a little easier to get through a paper quickly once you get some practice at it. But what about 10 papers? 100?! You can’t do all of your reading in a week. I set a habit for myself over the summer to read two papers a day for 2 months. If I missed a day, I made it up the next day. This keeps you fresh for each paper and less likely to miss important points because you’re falling asleep!

Get comfortable. I preferred to kick back on a couch or outside in a chair using my laptop in tablet mode so I had a long vertical screen and a stylus to highlight or circle things. Reading 2-column scientific articles on a 13 inch 16:9 laptop screen at a desk for hours on end is a special kind of torture that I just couldn’t endure. Change scenery often, try different beverages, take breaks, and move around!

Here are some bonus tips for breaking the monotony between papers:

• Pick your top few most controversial, confusing, or interesting papers and ask a colleague or advisor for their thoughts. Bring them some coffee to discuss it with you for another perspective. 
• Email the authors to ask a question or thank them for their contribution. This is a great way to make a connection. Don’t ask for too much on the first email or they may not respond - they are busy!  
• Reward yourself for every paper read. Maybe a small snack or a short walk around the block. Physically cross this paper off your to-do list so you internalize the good feeling of the accomplishment!

How do you choose which papers to read next?

So you’re downloading 15 new papers for every 1 paper you read? This could get out of control quickly! How do you keep up? Here are some tips for prioritization:

Google Scholar is an excellent tool for tracking citation trees and metrics that show the “importance” of each paper. Library portals or the journal websites can also be good for this.

• If you’re starting a search on a new topic, begin with a relevant review paper if one exists. Beware of reading too many review papers in a row! You’ll end up with an intimidating pile of citations to track down and it will be difficult to know where to start after a few-day break. 
• Prioritize experimental papers with high citation numbers, in journals with high impact factors and by authors with a high h-index (30+) published within the last 5 years. These papers will set the bar for every paper you read after. You can check the journal’s rank in your field by using Scimago . 
• Identify the most prominent authors in this field and find their most recent papers that may not have many citations (yet). This indicates where the field is heading and what the top experts are prioritizing. 
• After you’ve covered a lot of ground above, start taking more chances on less-established authors who may be taking new approaches or exploring new topics. By now you’ll be well-equipped to identify deficiencies in methods, hyperbolic claims, and arguments that are not well-supported by data. 

Final takeaways for how to read a scientific paper:

• Don't be a passive word-for-word reader. Be actively hunting and searching for info.
• Read in this order: Abstract, Conclusion, Figures, Results/Discussion, Methods.
• The figures are the anchors. Save the best ones to reproduce in your article and spend extra time to create your own summary figures to supercharge your chances of citation.
• Clean up the metadata and use a good tagging system to save time later. 
• Set your daily goal, reward yourself for finishing, and take breaks to avoid burnout!

Lastly, remember that this blog is sponsored by BioBox Analytics ! BioBox is a data analytics platform designed for scientists and clinicians working with next-generation-sequencing data. Design and run bioinformatic pipelines on demand, generate publication-ready plots, and discover insights using popular public databases. Get on the waitlist and be the first to access a free account at biobox.io !

What sections of a research paper should you read first?

The Abstract and Conclusion sections of a research paper give you a quick sense if you should continue spending time on the paper. Assess the quality of the research and whether the results are significant to your goals. If so, move to the most important Figures and find additional details in the Results and Discussion when necessary. 

What is the fastest way to read a research article?

Skim the Abstract and highlight anything of interest. Skip to the Conclusions and do the same. Write questions that pop up. Examine each Figure and find the in-line reference text for further details if needed for understanding. Then search the Results and Discussion for answers to your pre-written questions.  

What is the best citation manager software to use for my scientific papers?

I used Mendeley through grad school but recently Zotero seems to be more popular. Both are free and have all the features you need! EndNote is excellent but expensive, and if you lose your institutional license you’ll have a hard time transferring to one of the free offerings. Zotero is your best bet for long-term organizational success!

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How to Organize Research: Notes, PDF Files, & Documents

Topics covered ✅.

• How to organize research papers and PDF files
• How to organize research projects
• Organizing research notes
• Organizing research notes software
• Organizing research tools
• Research organizer template
• How to organize research material

If you are a busy college student, creator, or blogger your life can get really cluttered. But the messiness in our lives can extend much farther than just a dorm room or office. As active researchers, we can often struggle to organize research in the form of copious amounts of articles, journals, academic writings, thesis, rough drafts, etc.

It gets pretty exhausting.

But where do you even begin?

What's the best way to organize research?

We believe we have created the best recipe for organizing your research and you will never go back to your old ways.

1. Note-taking and Mind mapping – How to Hack Your Mind

First, start by organizing your notes into categories. You can do this on a sticky note or on a mind map.

Even though you may feel like a middle school kid using colorful sticky paper, sticky notes are proven to be one of the most effective ways to organize research.

You'll want to do some research before you begin writing.

Use sticky notes to organize the information you find, and write down any thoughts or ideas that come up as you read or listen.

Also, sticky notes are great if you want to jot down quick notes during a lecture or discussion with friends about the topic at hand.

You can write down important points and make connections between them on sticky notes.

An option similar to this is creating a mind map.

If you are a very visual learner, this style of research may appeal to you because you can visually see where you will be taking this research into categories and subcategories.

Plus it’s fun making them!

2. The Hard Part – Research & Writing

You should be familiar with the different types of sources that you can use when writing a research paper.

5 Examples of Sources

Here are a few examples of sources:

• Primary sources (original documents like letters or speeches)
• Secondary sources (articles, books, etc.)
• Audio files (podcasts, interviews, etc.)
• Online databases (Academic Search Complete, JSTOR, LexisNexis)
• Tertiary sources (reviews of other people's research and analysis of your topics

Bibliographies

When conducting research for your essay, be sure to use academic sources only!

Academic sources are those written by experts in their field who have been published in peer-reviewed journals or books and are therefore considered credible resources for learning more about any given topic.

Academic sources will always include citations at the end of each paragraph (or chapter) so that readers can easily identify where they can go if they'd like to learn more about the topic being discussed in each section of the text.

You can use secondary sources for information about your topic, but make sure that they are academically-reputable sources.

Primary sources are also great for finding information, but they provide only one side of the story and should be used with caution.

Overall, try to use a variety of sources as this will strengthen the argument you are defending.

We recommend putting a lot of emphasis on option five (tertiary sources) because it is something that we were not previously familiar with and we believe it should become more known as it is super helpful.

Tertiary sources are those that have been compiled by other people, such as academic journals and published books.

They can be great resources for getting more background information on a topic, but they aren't original works of scholarship—so be sure to cite them accordingly!

Quick Bibliographies

As you organize research, there’s no need to get bogged down in how you structure or create your bibliography.

For starters, here’s a simple list of tools for quick bibliographies:

• Bibliography.com

3. Putting Your Thoughts On Paper

One of the hardest parts is the beginning of the writing process. You should always keep in mind your thesis statement when you write.

It's easy to get carried away with details and forget what you're trying to say—but if you can keep your thesis statement in mind, it will help you stay focused on the main point of your work.

The writing process is a great way to get started with your research because it helps you organize your thoughts before writing them down into sentences and paragraphs.

You'll be able to take notes faster because everything is already written down for you!

Moving on, an excellent strategy that works best for me is just word vomiting onto a page to get a basis of everything you want to say, and then after that is done, organize and clean up what was written.

This is especially useful if you have collected all the data and you just don't know how to put your thoughts into actual words.

Claim My Free Research Organizer Template

This free research organizer template comes pre-built with folders, subfolders, aesthetic formatting, and much more.

4. The Finishing Touches

If there is anything you should take away from this, it’s to use a reference manager.

Reference managers help ensure that all your citations are correct and up-to-date.

When choosing one, make sure it's compatible with whatever citation style is required by your instructor or institution.

Research doesn't have to be something that you dread or bores you out of your mind.

Being organized can make this process fun and exciting.

So now it's time to put on your thinking cap and get to work.

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How to code and organize research notes for analysis like a pro

15 Minute Read

Conducting high quality, rigorous research is tough, regardless of how seasoned you are, because each research project is completely unique. In addition to actually doing the research itself, aggregating and organizing research notes can be overwhelming. 

Making sense of research data during synthesis and writing up a research report takes a lot of time. And if you don't organize your research notes and set yourself up for success early on, it will take even longer. You’ll miss out on important observations that will slow down your analysis and impact the quality of your research findings.

Taking the time to code and organize your research notes is key to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. In this article, we’ll share some practical tips to set you up for doing high quality analysis and synthesis. 

Re-Organize, Re-Group, Re-Compile: A method for making meaning out of mess.

You must be wondering - organize, group and compile make sense. But what does the 'Re' mean? This is a recursive approach to research. You cast a wide net to gather as many ideas and data points as you can when conducting your research. Don’t filter the data or try to make sense of it prematurely.  

This data-gathering stage is where you pull in qualitative data, like interview transcripts with direct quotes from a user interview analysis and/or observations from a user researcher’s notes. Only once you’ve collected all of your data do you start analysis.

It’s useful to timebox synthesis to a day or two, depending on the size of your study. Because of how fresh the data needs to be in your mind, it isn’t the type of thing you can span over weeks. Ideally, this process can be done with a teammate, but it can also be a solo activity. 

Break down information into smaller pieces of data that might become sub-topics, and then cluster that data into groups that display likeness or tension. Group and regroup that data to sharpen it and you’ll start to recognize recurring patterns or themes using a grounded theory approach. 

Don’t think about it too much, these groups aren’t set it stone, so just go with your gut. Later on, we’ll talk about how color coding and tags can augment you here.

 Once the initial cluster analysis is done, you begin to dive deeper into the data. Your research hasn't quite crossed the chasm to become anything meaningful quite yet, but you might start to sense emerging insights. During this messy middle stage of analysis, data still appears to be a bunch of disparate observations, anecdotes, and verbatims bunched into subtopics.

You may feel the need to do additional research as some points need to be elaborated further, or you want to add additional points. Continue to follow the above method again if you do bring in more data. 

Using physical or digital research notes

This process can be done with physical sticky notes or digital sticky notes . Some researchers prefer working outside of the physical limitations of a screen and to manipulate and marinade with the data in person. I’m a big fan of the physical war room, but there are a lot of upsides to working data digitally. Using tools designed specifically for this process, you won’t lose track of where data came from and will save time otherwise wasted writing and manually coding sticky notes.

Whether you opt for physical or digital notes, continue to regroup your data into sub-topics and then topics, until you feel confident with the higher level themes that are emerging.  

Applying meaning to research notes with color and tags

Coloring and tagging, otherwise known as “coding” in research, are effective ways to organize research notes and assign meaning to pieces of data. They are helpful as you start to pull apart and apply different lenses to your data during the synthesis process. 

Color as a visual cue

Color can be a powerful visual cue to see how patterns distribute across your themes. For example, using a unique color for each participant or persona type can reveal an interesting visual that becomes a nugget of an emerging insight. 

How heavily are you influencing one theme by a certain persona type or participant?

You can also assign a color to sentiment and see how positive or negative emotions are distributed across or concentrated in a particular product experience or workflow. This too can be done with either physical or digital sticky notes. 

Global versus project tags

You can think of tags in two buckets: global or project-based. Some tags will be universally applicable to any research, while others will surface during analysis and be completely unique to that dataset. 

For example, you may decide to code data across all research projects with persona type, like “Parent” or “Teacher.” Or you may get more specific and assign it to a participant as well, like “P1” or “T2.” You might also decide as a research organization to adopt tags like “Pain Point”, “Motivation”, “Goal”, or “Need.”

An example of a tag that might organically reveal itself in the data would be “Inequity”, “Age appropriateness”, or “Student interaction.” Notice that these are much more specific.

You can code data physically on sticky notes by simply writing the tag in the bottom of each note. However, there are constraints to this method, like if one note should be coded by several different tags and fits into multiple themes. In this scenario, you can duplicate the note.

If this process of coding data sounds tedious and time consuming, it certainly can be. But it’s also important. Turning over every stone and marinating in the data is important to fully immerse yourself into the synthesis process. 

Create your own AI-powered templates for better, faster research synthesis. Discover new customer insights from data instantly.

The top 10 things Notably shipped in 2023 and themes for 2024.

Using notably to code and organize research notes.

Notably is designed specifically for a research workflow, so you can speed up the tedious parts of coding and slow down to find meaningful insights.  

Notably has four sections in a research project: Info, Data, Analysis, and Insights. 

The Info tab serves as a space to document your research plan and goals. It can also be where you document the global and project tags used along with their meaning. This helps the team stay on track and on the same page, as well as orient any stakeholders or coworkers to the project. 

The Data tab is where you organize your raw research data, including written observations, video and audio recordings, photos, and more. This is where you start the process of coding data, highlighting important parts and tagging them with your global or project tags. Each highlight turns into digital sticky notes on the canvas and a row in a table in the analysis section.  

The Analysis tab is where you begin making sense of your notes. This is where you apply the method we discussed earlier of re-organizing, re-grouping, and re-compiling your notes. In this workspace you can group your data into “themes”, recolor your data by different criteria, as well as use AI to run a sentiment analysis from your notes. As you continue grouping and regrouping your data, patterns will start to emerge which will inform your research insights.

In the Insights tab, you can begin to develop thematic takeaways from your research.  What does the data mean, and why does it matter? Each insight allows you to add evidence from your data to support your conclusions. This is especially helpful once you begin to button up your research into a report, to then share with your team and stakeholders. The thematic takeaways you discover through your research allow you to know what future research needs to be done to expand on topics, which direction you may need to pivot to, and most importantly to develop a plan to better benefit your users and customers.  

With best research practices already baked into the foundation of Notably, you and your team can speed up your research process, and develop better, stronger insights to share. Find out more about Notably here: https://www.notably.ai/

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How to Organize Qualitative Research: A Step-by-Step Guide

Have you been struggling to dig out research that’s buried in long emails or Slack threads?

Not only can this be a time suck, but it can make all your hard-won data inaccessible, therefore, useless. As Tracy Teal, executive director of The Carpentries that teaches coding and data skills to researchers globally, points out , “your data are not useful unless people — and ‘future you’ — know what they are.”

The solution? Organizing qualitative data.

Sure, this sounds like a big commitment at first thought. But, it always pays off in the future.

So, in this post, we’ll cover:

• A recap of what qualitative data is
• All the work you need to do to organize qualitative data
• How Aurelius can help reduce the manual work involved

Let's get to it.

What is qualitative data?

Qualitative data is long-form data gathered using sources like user interviews (written or recorded), survey responses, questionnaires, and observational notes.

Unlike quantitative data, this data type provides in-depth insights into the respondents’ minds that reveal their emotional responses.

However, as valuable as this data is, its usefulness and all your hard work can easily go down the drain if you don’t take qualitative data management into account.

How do you organize qualitative data?

Before we dig in, it’s important to mention here that we’re proponents of organizing data before you start researching. Or, at least, as you research.

This comes with numerous benefits including:

• It speeds up user research data analysis . Since you’ve everything organized, you’re less likely to hit roadBlocks as you analyze data.
• Makes it easy to find and reuse data in the future . Naturally, this reduces work on your plate, boosting productivity and helping you make data-informed decisions.
• Easier (and faster) to apply all the takeaways from your research insights . You build up institutional knowledge and a better understanding of your product space and target audience over time.

With that, let’s get to the meaty part: steps in organizing qualitative data.

1. Start with a plan

Taking a planning-first approach sets you up for consistency in organizing qualitative data.

Two important things you should be addressing here:

Identify if you should be organizing qualitative data by project or product

Either pattern or a combination of the two are correct:

• Organizing by project . Example: user interviews for website UX – 2020
• Organizing by product or feature . Example: usability tests for leaving comments feature – 2020

But, the right way is the one that suits your team and those who will be accessing research data in the future.

So it’s helpful to involve key team members to get their thoughts on the organization pattern. Or, if your team has already been organizing research data using either pattern, stick to it

Agree on who will be incharge of all the data organizational work

You know what they say about too many cooks spoiling the broth. Sure, everyone on the UX research team can make notes and should have access to the data library (we’ll talk about this in a bit).

But having a dedicated person for housekeeping is an effective way to ensure all data is filed and organized according to the defined ground rules.

2. Settle on the organization tool you’ll use

A research organization tool is where you’ll be hosting and managing all the data. It’s here that you and your team will be taking notes too.

Keep in mind that memo writing or note-taking are essential in the research process. You record your thoughts, observations, and any follow-up questions. By doing so, you can easily pick up research from where you leave it. Not to mention, note-taking helps with qualitative data analysis too.

So there are three types of notes you and your team will be making throughout the research process:

• Observational notes: Notes on researcher’s observation based on what they see and listen.
• Theoretical notes: Notes compiling researcher’s controlled thoughts on analyzing what they observe (data interpretation notes).
• Methodological notes: Notes recording reminders for the research process including a critique on researcher’s tactics and method-related pointers such as sequencing, timing, stage setting, and so on.

Tip: You can add in-process memos as well. These address methodological questions like what to observe next and follow-up question(s) to ask – helping focus and guide future analysis and observation.

With your team aware of the different notes they are taking, agree on how to name each type of note.

For example, if a researcher on the team makes observational notes, they should add a previously agreed upon tag or name such as an abbreviation ‘ON’ for the note type. This saves notes from becoming unorganized personal monologues.

And, to ensure notes are all accessible, work out the organizational tool that’ll house them. A note-taking app, spreadsheet, and a research organization tool like Aurelius can help.

The latter, of course, comes with more benefits than a synced and shared note document or spreadsheet.

A dedicated tool, for example, reduces manual work involved in organizing data while helping create an accessible central research repository.

Want to shift all your current data from various spreadsheets and other random text files? Aurelius makes it easy for you with the following options:

• Upload data from a spreadsheet
• Upload audio files and the software transcribes it for you
• Copy and paste from any text file like Google Docs or Microsoft Word
• Use Zapier integrations to pull data from other tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Qualtrics, etc.
• Magic upload

Tip: Add tags to your notes so they’re easily findable. In fact, with tags in place, you can search your entire user research project by a tag to see all notes with that tag. Just make sure you create a parent note explaining how you’re adding tags.

3. Define a consistent file naming system

In the previous step, we’ve suggested you develop a consistent note naming system. Let’s expand on it further.

If everyone names research files with whatever name they think suits it best, it’ll quickly become challenging to keep track of all the files. This is where a file naming system comes into the picture.

Ideally, it’s best to settle on the document naming process at the start of a research project. A logical and consistent file naming system will help you and others locate research easily. It’ll also simplify organizing future research correctly.

So how do you create a file naming system?

As you settle on the way to name your files, make sure the system you devise is:

• Meaningful to you and your colleagues
• Makes it easy for everyone to find files

To this end, agree on the following file naming elements: vocabulary, dates, punctuation, order, and numbers. It’s best you create a name around these attributes:

• Data collection date
• Data collection method
• Participant ID number
• Site of data collection

Avoid using special characters such as dots and / \ : * ? " < > as they can make it difficult to maintain consistency.

4. Record key insights or UX nuggets

With choosing an accessible organization tool and settling on a file naming system out of the way, let’s get you to analyze data as you research.

While creating detailed reports is one way to record your findings, there’s a better, much more digestible way too: creating UX nuggets . Unlike research reports that are tedious to read, UX nuggets are easy to share, understand, and revisit.

Essentially, UX nuggets are key insights or findings, communicating what you’ve learned from your research – packaged as one snackable, therefore, reusable, insight at a time. This, in turn, helps you get more mileage from past research.

Basically, key insights capture answers to questions you ask as you research a topic, product, or feature.

To create your own consistent UX nuggets, address these four areas:

• Key insight statement - Example: Design team is looking to find out how they can improve the blog’s readability.
• Key insight description - Example: We learned adding more whitespace can help improve the blog’s readability.
• Supporting notes and/or documents - Add any specific notes or support material like videos, interviews, and so on.
• Tags - Example: #site-usability #readability

Tip: Add tags to key insights in Aurelius to make them easily searchable.

5. Organize data into themes and categories

Now, start combining notes, key insights, and data files sharing a common theme into broad categories.

Use folders or Group Tag in Aurelius to group these files so all information on a particular theme, topic, or category is located in one folder or under one broad tag.

If you’re manually creating folders, keep the following pointers in mind as you organize them:

• Name folders appropriately
• Structure folders hierarchically
• Separate ongoing and completed work

If you’re using Aurelius, you only need to add tags. For this, add all similar-themed tags (those you’ve added to your notes, UX nuggets, and other files) into a Tag Group.

6. Create a code library

Now is the part where you create notes on how you’ve been tagging different research insights. In other words: explain how you’re labeling each tag, Tag Group/folder to correspond to a particular category.

Technically, this process is known as coding, which Kathy Charmaz defines in their book , Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis , as

“Coding means naming segments of data with a label that simultaneously categorizes, summarizes, and accounts for each piece of data. Coding is the first step in moving beyond concrete statements in the data to making analytic interpretations.”

Therefore, a simple action step: pull out a new note in Aurelius and create a table of contents-like code dictionary or code table that enlists which Tag Groups contain which research. This way, you can organize folders properly.

If you prefer, add depth to this library by writing instructions explaining the criteria to include or exclude data under a tag or Tag Group. Pair each criterion with a data excerpt to show how the filing criterion has been applied (and can be in the future).

However, none of this would be possible if you haven’t mapped out buyer personas to guide recruitment.

7. Create a data inventory

If there’s a lot of research that your company creates, you’ll find it useful to create a data inventory. It’s a library of the code tables for different research projects you’ve conducted.

Since the data inventory provides a full record of all the accessible data a company owns, you need to include all the essential topical information to complete it.

Add the following elements:

• Researcher(s)
• Study description including researching purpose and research questions.
• Study method including information on participants (how many recruited and how – covering criteria for sampling as well).
• Information on study methods used (focus group, in-person or online interviews, and so on).
• Study duration answering when the study was conducted and how long it took.
• Data description offering details on the data such as how much data you have. This can be further divided into video or interview transcripts, research context, and appendices including any chart with a summary of data and data sample.

8. Share your research

“Research that isn’t shared is research that hasn’t been done,” observes Lindsey Redinger, InVision’s Manager of User Research and Operations on our podcast.

With that in mind, let’s dig into how to share your research as the last step in organizing qualitative data.

Traditionally, research reports and presentation decks have been used as the go-to way to share research. But those can not only be tedious to create but also to read.

A good solution then is sharing key insights in Collections.

Each research often answers questions that are of no value at that time. But they can be useful later on.

This is why all this work that you put into capturing, organizing, and managing your research work is helpful, serving as a vitamin in the long haul. It’s also what makes it easy to reshare new information from past studies.

So the best way to share research is by sharing high-level points or key insights from your research log over email.

To begin with, search through your tags to find relevant UX nuggets. Do so whenever:

• Someone on your team or another department asks if you’ve research on X topic or
• When you’re making a case for or against a point and want to back it up with research

Then, put them in a Collection, a shareable custom group of research data and insights. You can also attach a tag or two to share the raw data and notes that back the key findings.

From there, share the Collection by either adding the person’s email address or emailing them a link containing the read-only version.

If needed, schedule a follow-up call. At Aurelius, we’ve found this to be the most effective approach to sharing and revisiting research insights.

Tying it all together

See? Organizing qualitative research wasn’t so hard, was it?

To recap, start organizing qualitative data before you start researching. Then follow through this checklist for steps in organizing qualitative data:

• Agree on a qualitative data organization pattern (project-, feature-, or product-based) and a tool to host all your data, files, and notes.
• Create a consistent file naming system and start tagging notes.
• Create and tag UX nuggets or key insights to analyze data as you go.
• Put all tagged files, UX nuggets, sharing a topic, theme, or any other criteria you select into folders or Tag Groups.
• Create a code table to explain how you’ve tagged and grouped tagged files to set the foundation for future tags.
• Build a data inventory for developing a research repository as your research projects grow.
• Share key insights from current and past research projects using Collections and email them to even those who don’t have an Aurelius account.

Thanks to Masooma Memon for this expert guest post

Want to save yourself all the manual work and get a central, accessible-to-all home for your data?

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

9 Organizing Research: Taking and Keeping Effective Notes

Once you’ve located the right primary and secondary sources, it’s time to glean all the information you can from them. In this chapter, you’ll first get some tips on taking and organizing notes. The second part addresses how to approach the sort of intermediary assignments (such as book reviews) that are often part of a history course.

Honing your own strategy for organizing your primary and secondary research is a pathway to less stress and better paper success. Moreover, if you can find the method that helps you best organize your notes, these methods can be applied to research you do for any of your classes.

Before the personal computing revolution, most historians labored through archives and primary documents and wrote down their notes on index cards, and then found innovative ways to organize them for their purposes. When doing secondary research, historians often utilized (and many still do) pen and paper for taking notes on secondary sources. With the advent of digital photography and useful note-taking tools like OneNote, some of these older methods have been phased out – though some persist. And, most importantly, once you start using some of the newer techniques below, you may find that you are a little “old school,” and might opt to integrate some of the older techniques with newer technology.

Whether you choose to use a low-tech method of taking and organizing your notes or an app that will help you organize your research, here are a few pointers for good note-taking.

Principles of note-taking

• If you are going low-tech, choose a method that prevents a loss of any notes. Perhaps use one spiral notebook, or an accordion folder, that will keep everything for your project in one space. If you end up taking notes away from your notebook or folder, replace them—or tape them onto blank pages if you are using a notebook—as soon as possible.
• If you are going high-tech, pick one application and stick with it. Using a cloud-based app, including one that you can download to your smart phone, will allow you to keep adding to your notes even if you find yourself with time to take notes unexpectedly.
• When taking notes, whether you’re using 3X5 note cards or using an app described below, write down the author and a shortened title for the publication, along with the page number on EVERY card. We can’t emphasize this point enough; writing down the bibliographic information the first time and repeatedly will save you loads of time later when you are writing your paper and must cite all key information.
• Include keywords or “tags” that capture why you thought to take down this information in a consistent place on each note card (and when using the apps described below). If you are writing a paper about why Martin Luther King, Jr., became a successful Civil Rights movement leader, for example, you may have a few theories as you read his speeches or how those around him described his leadership. Those theories—religious beliefs, choice of lieutenants, understanding of Gandhi—might become the tags you put on each note card.
• Note-taking applications can help organize tags for you, but if you are going low tech, a good idea is to put tags on the left side of a note card, and bibliographic info on the right side.

Organizing research- applications that can help

Using images in research.

• If you are in an archive: make your first picture one that includes the formal collection name, the box number, the folder name and call numbe r and anything else that would help you relocate this information if you or someone else needed to. Do this BEFORE you start taking photos of what is in the folder.
• If you are photographing a book or something you may need to return to the library: take a picture of all the front matter (the title page, the page behind the title with all the publication information, maybe even the table of contents).

Once you have recorded where you find it, resist the urge to rename these photographs. By renaming them, they may be re-ordered and you might forget where you found them. Instead, use tags for your own purposes, and carefully name and date the folder into which the photographs were automatically sorted. There is one free, open-source program, Tropy , which is designed to help organize photos taken in archives, as well as tag, annotate, and organize them. It was developed and is supported by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is free to download, and you can find it here: https://tropy.org/ ; it is not, however, cloud-based, so you should back up your photos. In other cases, if an archive doesn’t allow photography (this is highly unlikely if you’ve made the trip to the archive), you might have a laptop on hand so that you can transcribe crucial documents.

Using note or project-organizing apps

When you have the time to sit down and begin taking notes on your primary sources, you can annotate your photos in Tropy. Alternatively, OneNote, which is cloud-based, can serve as a way to organize your research. OneNote allows you to create separate “Notebooks” for various projects, but this doesn’t preclude you from searching for terms or tags across projects if the need ever arises. Within each project you can start new tabs, say, for each different collection that you have documents from, or you can start new tabs for different themes that you are investigating. Just as in Tropy, as you go through taking notes on your documents you can create your own “tags” and place them wherever you want in the notes.

Another powerful, free tool to help organize research, especially secondary research though not exclusively, is Zotero found @ https://www.zotero.org/ . Once downloaded, you can begin to save sources (and their URL) that you find on the internet to Zotero. You can create main folders for each major project that you have and then subfolders for various themes if you would like. Just like the other software mentioned, you can create notes and tags about each source, and Zotero can also be used to create bibliographies in the precise format that you will be using. Obviously, this function is super useful when doing a long-term, expansive project like a thesis or dissertation.

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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5 Best Apps for Researchers: Apps that Every Researcher Should Know About

Today, one need not physically visit a library and take down notes on sheaves of paper (which are apt to fly about or clutter one’s workspace!). Various online tools and software applications (apps) have made our lives easier, especially the many helpful apps for researchers.

The use of apps to ease workload, manage time, or spark creativity are rapidly becoming de rigueur in all areas of work. In academia too, several apps for researchers are designed to help with daily activities, such as collecting and organizing resources, managing collaborative projects, maintaining daily and longer-term schedules, searching for and reading articles, and staying updated on multidisciplinary topics related to a study domain.

Here, I describe some of the best apps for researchers that can are available for free and can simplify both day-to-day tasks and research-related activities.

• Trello: Streamline individual and collaborative projects

Researchers need to keep track of various activities to optimize their productivity. A useful app for researchers, Trello  is a user-friendly app wherein one can create work boards for different projects and populate them with tasks. The user can assign deadlines and keep updating ongoing progress. Work boards can be shared with all team members, thereby smoothening collaborative working.

Trello offers tools to coordinate tasks among members working remotely or disparately, say, team members on the field and those in the lab. This is a particularly useful app for researchers involved in large projects, working with researchers situated across the globe. With this app you can track team projects and monitor in detail the progress of tasks under way. This can be counted among the best apps for researchers as it enables the visualization of workflows, providing team members with a comprehensive overview of a project from beginning to end. Integration with other applications allows users to access features in Gmail or other apps directly from Trello.

Key features

• Easy to use app for researchers
• Flexible and versatile
• Helps manage collaborative projects
• Evernote: Organize your thoughts and ideas

Are you still relying on Post-its and notepads? Do you jot down sudden ideas on a napkin in a coffee shop or on a scrap of paper while working in the lab? Note-taking apps like  Evernote  can help you make lists and take notes and never lose them. A handy app for researchers, Evernote helps you store all your ideas and thoughts, to-do lists, notes, and research links in one place. You can keep all these bits and bobs organized by creating separate tags and folders for different purposes.

The  Evernote web clipper  is a useful feature for saving articles, web pages, or screen grabs from the internet. You can save a page or highlights to your Evernote notebook along with any notes you want to make about that page. It allows you to sync your notes to all your devices, enabling you to organize your notes across multiple platforms. Further, this is one of the best apps for researchers because its multimedia features let you annotate images, embed files and pictures in your notes, and even record audio and video notes.

• Maintains notes, articles, and other content in one place
• Facilitates content clipping from the web
• Auto-sync across devices with this app for researchers
• R Discovery: Search Less, Read More

Researchers spend a large part of their time wading through a sea of literature, sifting out the relevant from the irrelevant.  R Discovery  is a free literature discovery app and is a great platform that lets you identify the most relevant academic research papers from top journals and publishers. This reading app for research papers covers all major disciplines in the arts and sciences.

R Discovery offers customized research reading, that is, once you set up your areas of interest, the app for research papers finds the top 3 reads and presents them in the form of a daily feed for you. Powered by AI, it learns your reading interests and finds matching relevant papers. It even provides on-the-go updates on recently published articles through notifications and email alerts making it one of the best apps for researchers. R Discovery offers a weekly roundup of the 5 latest articles and summaries of research articles from trending topics. With this intuitive app for research papers, you need not worry about a crucial article slipping through the cracks when you weren’t looking!

When you feed in key terms, the app “deep-dives” into the topics and offers articles, which you can sort by recency or relevance. It even helps you look for similar papers and bookmark important research papers. Mobile and web integration lets you read your bookmarked articles on the  R Discovery  website. What’s more, to customize your feed, you can even import your reading library from Mendeley and Zotero making this a must have app for researchers.

R Discovery can be considered a literature search and reading app for researchers everywhere that steers you in the right direction during your academic voyage!

• Curates 96+ million research articles, including over 24 million open access articles
• Intuitively provides key highlights, summaries, and roundups of research relevant to one’s field
• Integration with reference managers enables the R Discovery app for researchers to make better recommendations.

• Mendeley: Handle reference lists without getting bogged down

The thought of sorting and drawing up a reference list and formatting the in-text citations and references can make the most seasoned scholars break out into a sweat. However, useful apps for researchers like  Mendeley  take the load off these painstaking tasks and offer much more. Mendeley is a free reference management app that automatically generates bibliographies as you write. You don’t need to manually type references; Mendeley imports and organizes them in a systematic manner. The app for researchers allows you to insert citations and create reference lists in different journal formats rapidly and seamlessly. These features free up lot of time, which can be used to focus on paper or thesis writing.

Mendeley is available in both mobile and desktop formats, and researchers can conveniently read content on the go and even highlight text that they might want to return to. Researchers can export papers from the R Discovery app to Mendeley and Zotero. Once exported, they can find these papers in their libraries on ref managers. They can also connect their Mendeley and Zotero accounts with R Discovery (when they are setting up preferences on R Discovery). This will allow for this smart app for researchers to suggest topics based on the Mendeley or Zotero reading list.

• Helps annotate and organize documents
• Can be used across platforms seamlessly
• Integrates with literature discovery apps for researchers like R Discovery.
• Calm: Prevent burnout and focus on self-care

Researchers work for long hours, juggling multiple research tasks, securing funding, and dealing with stressors like dealing with harsh peer reviewer comments and article rejection. These factors can add up and affect a researcher’s mental well-being and motivation. Some  indicators can point to one’s need to focus on self-care , such as altered sleep patterns. A stressed researcher will constantly feel tired and be less efficient at work.

Calm  is a popular app for researchers looking to help reduce stress and anxiety, improve sleep quality, and aid in relaxation and self-improvement. The app provides sessions for guided meditation and breathing and masterclasses for managing stress, enhancing creativity, and much more. The use of such apps can even improve concentration and mindfulness. This is a great app for researchers to use to remain calm in the face of high work pressure, roadblocks in your experiments, and creative blocks when writing papers. A few minutes a day on such an app can help you break negative patterns. After all, a happy researcher is a productive researcher!

• Tracks a user’s basic statistics, e.g., minutes of meditation
• Sends meditation reminders
• Offers masterclasses taught by experts in the field of wellness.

Don’t worry, be “appy”!

Technological innovations like AI are constantly improving apps in terms of functions and user experience. While some apps for researchers help to ease the workload or aid in multitasking, others help in self-improvement and time management to let researchers focus better on core tasks. When possible, one should use some of these best apps for researchers to become savvier and more efficient, getting the most out of their time and effort.

R Discovery is a literature search and research reading platform that accelerates your research discovery journey by keeping you updated on the latest, most relevant scholarly content. With 250M+ research articles sourced from trusted aggregators like CrossRef, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, Open Alex and top publishing houses like Springer Nature, JAMA, IOP, Taylor & Francis, NEJM, BMJ, Karger, SAGE, Emerald Publishing and more, R Discovery puts a world of research at your fingertips.  

Try R Discovery Prime FREE for 1 week or upgrade at just US$72 a year to access premium features that let you listen to research on the go, read in your language, collaborate with peers, auto sync with reference managers, and much more. Choose a simpler, smarter way to find and read research – Download the app and start your free 7-day trial today !  

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Q. What's the best way to save sources for later?

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Answered By: APUS Librarians Last Updated: Jun 05, 2023     Views: 28339

It's important to carefully organize your research findings, to make writing and citing easier. Bookmarking an online resource might seem like the easiest way to keep track of it -- but it won't always work, as many databases create temporary urls (session IDs) that will expire.  When you return to the resource at a later time you may find that you can no longer access the article.

Here are librarians' favorite ways to keep articles together:

• If you're searching Primo , you can save your favorite articles and ebooks right there!  Click here to learn how .  
• Some individual databases also allow you to create free personal accounts on their sites.  These accounts will allow you to save articles to return to later.   ProQuest and EBSCO are two examples, but there are others.  Look for a "sign in" or "register" link when you're searching.  
• Use a citation management tool to store, organize and format your sources!   Find out how to get started .  
• Try the cloud!  Your free Microsoft 365 account includes 1TB of cloud storage via OneDrive..  
• Create a permanent or persistent url (aka permalink ).   You can bookmark permalinks, organize them in a Word document, or use your citation manager to store them.  
• Or, simply create a folder for your research assignment on your computer or device...then download your sources as you go !   Find out how to limit your search to full text , so that you always have the option to save.  

See also :  Why should I keep a research journal?

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Home › Blog › 15 Genius Tips for Storing Papers and Getting Organized

15 Genius Tips for Storing Papers and Getting Organized

By Donella Crigger

Published Jun 10, 2024

Storing papers can be a real pain. They accumulate quickly, and before you know it, your desk is buried. But there are plenty of clever ways to get rid of paper clutter so that they’re out of sight but still within reach and easily findable when you need them. Below, you’ll find creative paper storage ideas for everything from your kid’s artwork and school papers to receipts to scrapbook paper. Once you get a handle on the paper clutter, you’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll feel. Getting organized is therapeutic, isn’t it? Here are 15+ ideas to get you started.

How Do You Organize Years of Paperwork?

Many people find themselves overwhelmed by piles of paper. Old bills, school papers, and mementos can quickly take over a home or office. The key to keeping paper clutter under control is to develop a system for storing papers. One way to do this is to create a filing system. Papers can be sorted by month, year, or type of document. Another option is to scan important documents and store them electronically. This can save space and make it easier to search for specific items. Whatever storage system you choose, the important thing is to be consistent in using it. By taking the time to organize your papers, you can create a more efficient and clutter-free home or workspace.

How Does Marie Kondo Organize Papers?

Marie first sorts papers into two categories: papers to be dealt with and papers to be saved. Dealing with papers refers to things like school forms for your children, letters that need a reply, or something that needs to be read (a magazine or newspaper, for example). She divides the papers that are to be saved further into frequently used papers and infrequently used papers. Everything else should be thrown out or saved digitally. And although she recommends storing all infrequently used paperwork together, we’d recommend storing things like birth certificates, death certificates, social security cards, and insurance policies in a fireproof safe or document box.

How Long Should You Keep Paperwork?

Storing papers can be a tricky business. On the one hand, you want to keep important documents safe and sound. On the other hand, you don’t want your home to turn into a paper graveyard. So how do you strike the right balance?

Here are a few general guidelines to help you decide how long to keep paperwork:

• Tax returns and supporting documents: 3-7 years, per IRS guidelines
• Bank statements: 1 year
• Credit card statements: 1 year if you rely on paper copies, 3 years if you use them for tax purposes
• Pay stubs: 1 year
• Utility bills: 1 year unless you’ve used some monthly bills as a home office deduction in which case you should keep them for 3 years
• Insurance policies: at least as long as the policy is active, but ideally for up to 3 years in case there have been any mistakes on past claims
• Warranties and receipts: as long as the item is under warranty but if used for tax purposes, then keep for 3 years

Of course, these are just general guidelines. You may need to keep certain documents for longer periods of time, depending on your personal situation.

Don’t forget to invest in a good paper shredder for shredding documents with sensitive information before throwing them out.

Ideas for Storing Papers

Ready to get started organizing your papers? Here are some smart tips and tricks to organize just about every type of paper you can think of.

Scan documents and save them as PDFs on your computer or in the cloud.

This first tip is obvious, but it’s an important one. Save as many papers digitally as you can to minimize the physical papers that you have to keep. You can scan everything from old newspaper clippings to your child’s artwork instead of maintaining physical copies. Just make sure that you have a copy of wherever you’re storing your digitized papers. If you’re saving them to your computer or an external hard drive, for instance, a cloud backup is a great idea. Just a Girl and Her Blog offers some great tips on organizing papers with Evernote . Digital storage is handy because you can use apps like Evernote on all your devices, from your smartphone to your laptop, desktop, or tablet.

Set up a homework station to organize school papers.

We love this station setup from Life’s Carousel. They have four cardboard magazine files to hold all the school-related papers at their organization station . The first one labeled “paper” holds lined paper and plain paper so the kids can do their homework. The “to sign” file holds all the papers the parent or guardian needs to fill out. The “to school” file holds papers and library books that need to go back to the school. And finally, the “keep” file holds things like the school calendar, study guides, etc. It would also be a great place to keep the meal plan if your kids do hot lunches at school.

Create a changeable kids’ art display.

Kids are super proud of their art, and parents love putting it on display. But if you don’t want your walls and fridge absolutely covered in the stuff, follow this tutorial from Ikea Hackers for a kids art display box . Each box can hold quite a few pieces of art, and the kids can switch out the one they want displayed in front. Once the box is full, have your child go through them saving 1-3 of their favorite pieces, and scan the rest to save digitally. Put the others in the trash or pass some along to Grandma and Grandpa for safekeeping.

Use color coded files to organize important documents.

Color coding your files is a great idea to find what you need at a glance. Anna uses color-coded hanging files to keep a handle on her paperwork. Bills are sorted by month rather than by company. Tax documents are all kept in a certain color, as are her business-related expenses. Each member of the family also has their own color of file where important documents like birth certificates, passports, and sentimental documents are stored.

Set up a mobile command center.

If your kitchen is the central area of your home where paper clutter tends to pile up, use this genius mobile command center idea from A Bowl Full of Lemons to keep it under control. It’s a quick and easy system for sorting mail and other incoming papers into actionable items like incoming and outgoing mail, things to file, bills to pay, and things to sign and return.

Make a receipt drop box to hold receipts until you can file them.

If you save receipts for tax purposes or have to file for reimbursements from your employer, you may find yourself looking for receipts in half a dozen places. Eliminate that problem with a super simple receipt drop box like this one from Carissa Shaw made from none other than an empty tissue box. It’s so easy I’m smacking my forehead and wondering why I’ve never thought of this.

Store documents you use frequently in color coded binders.

Have a lot of documents that you refer to frequently? Store them in color-coded binders as you see here at A Bowl Full of Lemons. Each category—medical, manuals, pets, house, personal, and auto gets its own color. The only one I’d eliminate is the “manuals” binder only because most manuals for electronics and appliances can be found online these days, so there’s no real reason to keep them.

Organize incoming and outgoing mail at the door.

With such a big movement to get away from paper products, you’d think that the junk mail would have decreased by now, but it hasn’t. So, if you’re inundated with mail on a daily basis, set up a mail system like this one from Her Tool Belt to organize coupons, bills, incoming, and outgoing mail. Personally, I’d toss the ads right away instead of making a section for them, but if you plan to shred and use those ads for mulch, then keep that category.

Store school papers in separate bins for each child.

Kids and parents alike can be a little sentimental when it comes to their school papers. To allow them to keep documents that are important to them without letting it get out of hand, give each child a keepsake box for their special papers. Inside each box, keep a folder labeled with each grade. Keep the reports, papers, and artwork that they’re really proud of, and get rid of the rest.

Maintain an organized desk with multiple paper systems.

Can a girl have a dream desk? If so, this is mine. Design Improvised uses several paper organization systems to manage the chaos. First up are the file folders sitting right on her desk for the most common types of papers such as bills, receipts, and coupons. Papers that she wants to flip through are kept in binders (recipes, kids’ artwork, etc.). She uses boxes to store things like checkbooks, mementos, stationery, and shipping supplies. Finally, important reminders are pinned to a cork board.

Organize receipts by month.

Keep this small monthly organizer in your car (or purse if you carry a large one) to organize your receipts right away. The DIY Playbook is organizing hers by month, but you could try by category like food, clothing, gas, etc. if that suits your needs better. Label the organizer in a way that makes sense to you! She also has tips for organizing receipts digitally.

Utilize clipboards to organize papers.

Okay, so these are styled clipboards , but you can totally run with this idea for keeping up with your kids’ school papers or chores. Have a clipboard for each child with their homework assignments, chore list, forms, and anything else they need. Simple, functional, and quick to grab!

Make a kitchen command center inside a cabinet.

In smaller homes where space is limited, a kitchen command center like this one from Organizing Home Life is a great idea. She utilizes both the cabinet door and inside the cabinet to maximize space. On the inside of the door, she has various pockets for receipts and bills to pay or file. You’ll also find 3-ring binders and stackable bins to further keep things organized. (Psst… we have more command center ideas you should check out!)

Use envelopes in a binder to store receipts.

Here’s another nifty receipt storage idea, this time using envelopes inside a binder. A new envelope is created for each month with the month and year on the front. All month long, you’ll slide your receipts inside. At the end of the month, put the flap down, and add a new envelope—great idea from Megan Nielsen!

Display and store colored paper on a paper rack.

Crafty types have large stashes of colorful and patterned papers, but when it comes time to find the perfect color or design, well, that can get a little tricky. It’s hard to find what you need when it’s all in a pile, right? Use this wire rack storage idea from Hey Let’s Make Stuff to store and see all the papers you have available in a snap. (We have more ideas for organizing your craft room , too.)

We hope you found some useful ways to store your papers here. Pin this list to come back to it later!

More Helpful Storage Ideas:

• 12 Smart Gift Wrap Storage Ideas
• 18 Clever Hidden Storage Ideas to Hide Clutter
• Document Storage Tips To Keep You Organized

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3 simple steps to get organized and save money.

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Reviewing monthly budget

Owning a lot of stuff is expensive. And your disorganized belongings can cost you even more money. If you cannot find something, you rebuy it. One of the most commonly lost items is paper and original documents can be expensive to replace. Excess stuff costs time and money because important possessions are buried under things you don’t use or need. The good news is, if you get organized, you can save money, too.

It starts by understanding that when you reduce the volume, spaces have a way of organizing themselves. Owning less creates the organization you’re looking for. The perfect bin or a bigger house will not solve the problem. In fact, it typically makes it worse. A larger home is more expensive to buy, furnish, heat, cool, insure, and maintain. And you cannot buy your way out of disorganization either just by acquiring organizing tools. Buying organizing solutions will only mask the problem because excess stuff is the problem. And once upon a time, all that stuff was money.

So how do you turn the tide on disorganization and save money? These three steps and mindset shifts will help.

1. Identify The Excess Items

Start by identifying areas in your home that feel full or cluttered. Where are you trying to store too much stuff? These areas are spaces where it’s difficult to find things and where you cannot easily move around. You’re constantly rearranging because the room is full without margin . These rooms are places you just avoid entirely.

Are your pantry, fridge, and freezer jam packed? Is the closet overflowing? Do you have endless piles of paper? Do you own enough books and bookshelves to start your own library? Is your garage a place where things go missing?

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No matter the space, stocking up from a sale is not always a money saver. Food is more likely to go to waste in a full fridge or pantry because you don’t know what you have. Have you ever purchased an item in bulk and threw away half of it because your family doesn't like it anymore?

Donation centers are filled with brand new clothing and the original tags. Perhaps you have items like this in your closet? And yet, you still get dressed every day from a laundry basket. Are there piles of unread books but no time to read?

Once you identify the excess, applying the next step will help.

2. Set A New Boundary

Set boundaries for every category you own. This mindset shift ensures that our physical possessions don’t own us. Without boundaries, stuff can overtake your home. Think of boundaries as another way of budgeting not just your money but your time and space, too.

Before you buy, consider if there is room for another small appliance in the kitchen cabinets. Filling your kitchen counters with appliances makes cooking at home difficult. This leads families to choose expensive takeout instead. If there isn’t room for a new gadget, see if you can make the recipe a different way. And always designate a home for things before you buy. Respect the boundary you have and resist storing kitchen items in the garage or basement.

Similarly, keeping all your clothing in one closet will save time and money. No more searching through bins of off-season clothing when the weather changes. By setting a smaller boundary for your wardrobe, you keep only the items you wear and shop smarter .

3. Intentional Shopping

Now that you’ve defined boundaries for the items in your home, you’ll need habits and systems to keep it that way. This is where you can save the most money. Be an intentional shopper and make necessary purchases. By bringing less stuff into your home, it will be easier to live within the boundaries you established, and create more organization. Before you shop, adopt these money saving habits.

Create A Weekly Meal Plan

Start your meal plan by assessing the inventory of your fridge, freezer, and pantry and build as many dinners as you can without shopping. Research substitutions for unique ingredients. Buy only basic staples and items that complement the meal plan. Make a list and stick to it.

Use Up Consumables

Whether it’s cat food, travel toothpaste, cleaning products, or toilet paper, use all of it. Cancel subscriptions that have gotten out of hand. Resolve to not shop until absolutely necessary. (Yes, that means groceries, too.) Virtually any cabinet will be more organized with less stuff. Using this inventory will save money and reduce waste.

Borrow, Repurpose Or Reuse

If a need arises in your home, stop and consider other options before you buy. Avoid buying at all cost. Could you borrow the item from a neighbor? Can you repurpose or reuse something you already own? Don’t allow yourself to impulse buy.

Borrow, Don’t Buy Books

The goal of any book lover is to read more books not own more. When you reduce the number of books you own, you will read more. I purged my entire book collection and started reading more as a result. Pass on all the books that do not fit in your newly established boundary and stop buying books altogether. Maintain your boundary by borrowing from the library. The library is free and has various formats (hardcover, paperback, audio, and e-reader). You can save thousands of dollars by borrowing from the library.

Stop Paper Before It Enters Your Home

Establish one inbox as your paper boundary. Ensure that important documents such as bills are stored here. Process paperwork once a week so it doesn’t overwhelm your space and you avoid late payment fees. Stop at the recycle bin after collecting your mail to dispose of catalogs and coupons featuring advertisements. Take it a step further and stop credit card offers, loan pre-approvals, and catalogs from entering your mailbox by registering with Opt-Out Prescreen and Catalog Choice . Fewer advertisements means less buying.

There’s no question that owning less stuff will save you money but it’s not easy to shift your mindset and adopt new habits to reduce the items in your home.

Try this: Review your bank account and your average monthly expenditures. Make a note of the number. Consider how you feel about what you’re currently spending and saving. Could you make better decisions? Would you like to increase your savings each month? Set a goal.

Then, for 90 days adopt the five intentional shopping habits above. And review your bank account at the end of the 90 days. What’s the new monthly expenditure? If you commit to these five habits, you’ll see a significant difference. And your home and finances will be more organized, too.

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Scientists use computational modeling to guide a difficult chemical synthesis

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Researchers from MIT and the University of Michigan have discovered a new way to drive chemical reactions that could generate a wide variety of compounds with desirable pharmaceutical properties.

These compounds, known as azetidines, are characterized by four-membered rings that include nitrogen. Azetidines have traditionally been much more difficult to synthesize than five-membered nitrogen-containing rings, which are found in many FDA-approved drugs.

The reaction that the researchers used to create azetidines is driven by a photocatalyst that excites the molecules from their ground energy state. Using computational models that they developed, the researchers were able to predict compounds that can react with each other to form azetidines using this kind of catalysis.

“Going forward, rather than using a trial-and-error process, people can prescreen compounds and know beforehand which substrates will work and which ones won't,” says Heather Kulik, an associate professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at MIT.

Kulik and Corinna Schindler, a professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science . Emily Wearing, recently a graduate student at the University of Michigan, is the lead author of the paper. Other authors include University of Michigan postdoc Yu-Cheng Yeh, MIT graduate student Gianmarco Terrones, University of Michigan graduate student Seren Parikh, and MIT postdoc Ilia Kevlishvili.

Light-driven synthesis

Many naturally occurring molecules, including vitamins, nucleic acids, enzymes and hormones, contain five-membered nitrogen-containing rings, also known as nitrogen heterocycles. These rings are also found in more than half of all FDA-approved small-molecule drugs, including many antibiotics and cancer drugs.

Four-membered nitrogen heterocycles, which are rarely found in nature, also hold potential as drug compounds. However, only a handful of existing drugs, including penicillin, contain four-membered heterocycles, in part because these four-membered rings are much more difficult to synthesize than five-membered heterocycles.

In recent years, Schindler’s lab has been working on synthesizing azetidines using light to drive a reaction that combines two precursors, an alkene and an oxime. These reactions require a photocatalyst, which absorbs light and passes the energy to the reactants, making it possible for them to react with each other.

“The catalyst can transfer that energy to another molecule, which moves the molecules into excited states and makes them more reactive. This is a tool that people are starting to use to make it possible to make certain reactions occur that wouldn't normally occur,” Kulik says.

Schindler’s lab found that while this reaction sometimes worked well, other times it did not, depending on which reactants were used. They enlisted Kulik, an expert in developing computational approaches to modeling chemical reactions, to help them figure out how to predict when these reactions will occur.

The two labs hypothesized that whether a particular alkene and oxime will react together in a photocatalyzed reaction depends on a property known as the frontier orbital energy match. Electrons that surround the nucleus of an atom exist in orbitals, and quantum mechanics can be used to predict the shape and energies of these orbitals. For chemical reactions, the most important electrons are those in the outermost, highest energy (“frontier”) orbitals, which are available to react with other molecules.

Kulik and her students used density functional theory, which uses the Schrödinger equation to predict where electrons could be and how much energy they have, to calculate the orbital energy of these outermost electrons.

These energy levels are also affected by other groups of atoms attached to the molecule, which can change the properties of the electrons in the outermost orbitals.

Once those energy levels are calculated, the researchers can identify reactants that have similar energy levels when the photocatalyst boosts them into an excited state. When the excited states of an alkene and an oxime are closely matched, less energy is required to boost the reaction to its transition state — the point at which the reaction has enough energy to go forward to form products.

Accurate predictions

After calculating the frontier orbital energies for 16 different alkenes and nine oximes, the researchers used their computational model to predict whether 18 different alkene-oxime pairs would react together to form an azetidine. With the calculations in hand, these predictions can be made in a matter of seconds.

The researchers also modeled a factor that influences the overall yield of the reaction: a measure of how available the carbon atoms in the oxime are to participate in chemical reactions.

The model’s predictions suggested that some of these 18 reactions won’t occur or won’t give a high enough yield. However, the study also showed that a significant number of reactions are correctly predicted to work.

“Based on our model, there's a much wider range of substrates for this azetidine synthesis than people thought before. People didn't really think that all of this was accessible,” Kulik says.

Of the 27 combinations that they studied computationally, the researchers tested 18 reactions experimentally, and they found that most of their predictions were accurate. Among the compounds they synthesized were derivatives of two drug compounds that are currently FDA-approved: amoxapine, an antidepressant, and indomethacin, a pain reliever used to treat arthritis.

This computational approach could help pharmaceutical companies predict molecules that will react together to form potentially useful compounds, before spending a lot of money to develop a synthesis that might not work, Kulik says. She and Schindler are continuing to work together on other kinds of novel syntheses, including the formation of compounds with three-membered rings.

“Using photocatalysts to excite substrates is a very active and hot area of development, because people have exhausted what you can do on the ground state or with radical chemistry,” Kulik says. “I think this approach is going to have a lot more applications to make molecules that are normally thought of as really challenging to make.”

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Scientific breakthroughs: 2024 emerging trends to watch

December 28, 2023

Across disciplines and industries, scientific discoveries happen every day, so how can you stay ahead of emerging trends in a thriving landscape? At CAS, we have a unique view of recent scientific breakthroughs, the historical discoveries they were built upon, and the expertise to navigate the opportunities ahead. In 2023, we identified the top scientific breakthroughs , and 2024 has even more to offer. New trends to watch include the accelerated expansion of green chemistry, the clinical validation of CRISPR, the rise of biomaterials, and the renewed progress in treating the undruggable, from cancer to neurodegenerative diseases. To hear what the experts from Lawrence Liverpool National Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab are saying on this topic, join us for a free webinar on January 25 from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. EDT for a panel discussion on the trends to watch in 2024.

The ascension of AI in R&D

While the future of AI has always been forward-looking, the AI revolution in chemistry and drug discovery has yet to be fully realized. While there have been some high-profile set-backs , several breakthroughs should be watched closely as the field continues to evolve. Generative AI is making an impact in drug discovery , machine learning is being used more in environmental research , and large language models like ChatGPT are being tested in healthcare applications and clinical settings.

Many scientists are keeping an eye on AlphaFold, DeepMind’s protein structure prediction software that revolutionized how proteins are understood. DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs have recently announced how their latest model shows improved accuracy, can generate predictions for almost all molecules in the Protein Data Bank, and expand coverage to ligands, nucleic acids, and posttranslational modifications . Therapeutic antibody discovery driven by AI is also gaining popularity , and platforms such as the RubrYc Therapeutics antibody discovery engine will help advance research in this area.

Though many look at AI development with excitement, concerns over accurate and accessible training data , fairness and bias , lack of regulatory oversight , impact on academia, scholarly research and publishing , hallucinations in large language models , and even concerns over infodemic threats to public health are being discussed. However, continuous improvement is inevitable with AI, so expect to see many new developments and innovations throughout 2024.

‘Greener’ green chemistry

Green chemistry is a rapidly evolving field that is constantly seeking innovative ways to minimize the environmental impact of chemical processes. Here are several emerging trends that are seeing significant breakthroughs:

• Improving green chemistry predictions/outcomes : One of the biggest challenges in green chemistry is predicting the environmental impact of new chemicals and processes. Researchers are developing new computational tools and models that can help predict these impacts with greater accuracy. This will allow chemists to design safer and more environmentally friendly chemicals.
• Reducing plastics: More than 350 million tons of plastic waste is generated every year. Across the landscape of manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers, reducing the use of single-use plastics and microplastics is critical. New value-driven approaches by innovators like MiTerro that reuse industrial by-products and biomass waste for eco-friendly and cheaper plastic replacements will soon be industry expectations. Lowering costs and plastic footprints will be important throughout the entire supply chain.    
• Alternative battery chemistry: In the battery and energy storage space, finding alternatives to scarce " endangered elements" like lithium and cobalt will be critical. While essential components of many batteries, they are becoming scarce and expensive. New investments in lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries that do not use nickel and cobalt have expanded , with 45% of the EV market share being projected for LFP in 2029. Continued research is projected for more development in alternative materials like sodium, iron, and magnesium, which are more abundant, less expensive, and more sustainable.
• More sustainable catalysts : Catalysts speed up a chemical reaction or decrease the energy required without getting consumed. Noble metals are excellent catalysts; however, they are expensive and their mining causes environmental damage. Even non-noble metal catalysts can also be toxic due to contamination and challenges with their disposal. Sustainable catalysts are made of earth-abundant elements that are also non-toxic in nature. In recent years, there has been a growing focus on developing sustainable catalysts that are more environmentally friendly and less reliant on precious metals. New developments with catalysts, their roles, and environmental impact will drive meaningful progress in reducing carbon footprints.  
• Recycling lithium-ion batteries: Lithium-ion recycling has seen increased investments with more than 800 patents already published in 2023. The use of solid electrolytes or liquid nonflammable electrolytes may improve the safety and durability of LIBs and reduce their material use. Finally, a method to manufacture electrodes without solvent s could reduce the use of deprecated solvents such as N-methylpyrrolidinone, which require recycling and careful handling to prevent emissions.

Rise of biomaterials

New materials for biomedical applications could revolutionize many healthcare segments in 2024. One example is bioelectronic materials, which form interfaces between electronic devices and the human body, such as the brain-computer interface system being developed by Neuralink. This system, which uses a network of biocompatible electrodes implanted directly in the brain, was given FDA approval to begin human trials in 2023.

• Bioelectronic materials: are often hybrids or composites, incorporating nanoscale materials, highly engineered conductive polymers, and bioresorbable substances. Recently developed devices can be implanted, used temporarily, and then safely reabsorbed by the body without the need for removal. This has been demonstrated by a fully bioresorbable, combined sensor-wireless power receiver made from zinc and the biodegradable polymer, poly(lactic acid).
• Natural biomaterials: that are biocompatible and naturally derived (such as chitosan, cellulose nanomaterials, and silk) are used to make advanced multifunctional biomaterials in 2023. For example, they designed an injectable hydrogel brain implant for treating Parkinson’s disease, which is based on reversible crosslinks formed between chitosan, tannic acid, and gold nanoparticles.
• Bioinks : are used for 3D printing of organs and transplant development which could revolutionize patient care. Currently, these models are used for studying organ architecture like 3D-printed heart models for cardiac disorders and 3D-printed lung models to test the efficacy of drugs. Specialized bioinks enhance the quality, efficacy, and versatility of 3D-printed organs, structures, and outcomes. Finally, new approaches like volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) of pristine silk- based bioinks are unlocking new frontiers of innovation for 3D printing.

To the moon and beyond

The global Artemis program is a NASA-led international space exploration program that aims to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon by 2025 as part of the long-term goal of establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon. Additionally, the NASA mission called Europa Clipper, scheduled for a 2024 launch, will orbit around Jupiter and fly by Europa , one of Jupiter’s moons, to study the presence of water and its habitability. China’s mission, Chang’e 6 , plans to bring samples from the moon back to Earth for further studies. The Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission by Japan’s JAXA plans to bring back samples from Phobos, one of the Mars moons. Boeing is also expected to do a test flight of its reusable space capsule Starliner , which can take people to low-earth orbit.

The R&D impact of Artemis extends to more fields than just aerospace engineering, though:

• Robotics: Robots will play a critical role in the Artemis program, performing many tasks, such as collecting samples, building infrastructure, and conducting scientific research. This will drive the development of new robotic technologies, including autonomous systems and dexterous manipulators.
• Space medicine: The Artemis program will require the development of new technologies to protect astronauts from the hazards of space travel, such as radiation exposure and microgravity. This will include scientific discoveries in medical diagnostics, therapeutics, and countermeasures.
• Earth science: The Artemis program will provide a unique opportunity to study the Moon and its environment. This will lead to new insights into the Earth's history, geology, and climate.
• Materials science: The extreme space environment will require new materials that are lightweight, durable, and radiation resistant. This will have applications in many industries, including aerospace, construction, and energy.
• Information technology: The Artemis program will generate a massive amount of data, which will need to be processed, analyzed, and shared in real time. This will drive the development of new IT technologies, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

The CRISPR pay-off

After years of research, setbacks, and minimal progress, the first formal evidence of CRISPR as a therapeutic platform technology in the clinic was realized. Intellia Therapeutics received FDA clearance to initiate a pivotal phase 3 trial of a new drug for the treatment of hATTR, and using the same Cas9 mRNA, got a new medicine treating a different disease, angioedema. This was achieved by only changing 20 nucleotides of the guide RNA, suggesting that CRISPR can be used as a therapeutic platform technology in the clinic.

The second great moment for CRISPR drug development technology came when Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics announced the authorization of the first CRISPR/Cas9 gene-edited therapy, CASGEVY™, by the United Kingdom MHRA, for the treatment of sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia. This was the first approval of a CRISPR-based therapy for human use and is a landmark moment in realizing the potential of CRISPR to improve human health.

In addition to its remarkable genome editing capability, the CRISPR-Cas system has proven to be effective in many applications, including early cancer diagnosis . CRISPR-based genome and transcriptome engineering and CRISPR-Cas12a and CRISPR-Cas13a appear to have the necessary characteristics to be robust detection tools for cancer therapy and diagnostics. CRISPR-Cas-based biosensing system gives rise to a new era for precise diagnoses of early-stage cancers.

MIT engineers have also designed a new nanoparticle DNA-encoded nanosensor for urinary biomarkers that could enable early cancer diagnoses with a simple urine test. The sensors, which can detect cancerous proteins, could also distinguish the type of tumor or how it responds to treatment.

Ending cancer

The immuno-oncology field has seen tremendous growth in the last few years. Approved products such as cytokines, vaccines, tumor-directed monoclonal antibodies, and immune checkpoint blockers continue to grow in market size. Novel therapies like TAC01-HER2 are currently undergoing clinical trials. This unique therapy uses autologous T cells, which have been genetically engineered to incorporate T cell Antigen Coupler (TAC) receptors that recognize human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) presence on tumor cells to remove them. This could be a promising therapy for metastatic, HER2-positive solid tumors.

Another promising strategy aims to use the CAR-T cells against solid tumors in conjunction with a vaccine that boosts immune response. Immune boosting helps the body create more host T cells that can target other tumor antigens that CAR-T cells cannot kill.

Another notable trend is the development of improved and effective personalized therapies. For instance, a recently developed personalized RNA neoantigen vaccine, based on uridine mRNA–lipoplex nanoparticles, was found effective against pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Major challenges in immuno-oncology are therapy resistance, lack of predictable biomarkers, and tumor heterogenicity. As a result, devising novel treatment strategies could be a future research focus.

Decarbonizing energy

Multiple well-funded efforts are underway to decarbonize energy production by replacing fossil fuel-based energy sources with sources that generate no (or much less) CO2 in 2024.

One of these efforts is to incorporate large-scale energy storage devices into the existing power grid. These are an important part of enabling the use of renewable sources since they provide additional supply and demand for electricity to complement renewable sources. Several types of grid-scale storage that vary in the amount of energy they can store and how quickly they can discharge it into the grid are under development. Some are physical (flywheels, pumped hydro, and compressed air) and some are chemical (traditional batteries, flow batteries , supercapacitors, and hydrogen ), but all are the subject of active chemistry and materials development research. The U.S. government is encouraging development in this area through tax credits as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and a $7 billion program to establish regional hydrogen hubs.

Meanwhile, nuclear power will continue to be an active R&D area in 2024. In nuclear fission, multiple companies are developing small modular reactors (SMRs) for use in electricity production and chemical manufacturing, including hydrogen. The development of nuclear fusion reactors involves fundamental research in physics and materials science. One major challenge is finding a material that can be used for the wall of the reactor facing the fusion plasma; so far, candidate materials have included high-entropy alloys and even molten metals .

Neurodegenerative diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases are a major public health concern, being a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. While there is currently no cure for any neurodegenerative disease, new scientific discoveries and understandings of these pathways may be the key to helping patient outcomes.

• Alzheimer’s disease: Two immunotherapeutics have received FDA approval to reduce both cognitive and functional decline in individuals living with early Alzheimer's disease. Aducannumab (Aduhelm®) received accelerated approval in 2021 and is the first new treatment approved for Alzheimer’s since 2003 and the first therapy targeting the disease pathophysiology, reducing beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of early Alzheimer’s disease patients. Lecanemab (Leqembi®) received traditional approval in 2023 and is the first drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology to show clinical benefits, reducing the rate of disease progression and slowing cognitive and functional decline in adults with early stages of the disease.
• Parkinson’s disease: New treatment modalities outside of pharmaceuticals and deep brain stimulation are being researched and approved by the FDA for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease symptoms. The non-invasive medical device, Exablate Neuro (approved by the FDA in 2021), uses focused ultrasound on one side of the brain to provide relief from severe symptoms such as tremors, limb rigidity, and dyskinesia. 2023 brought major news for Parkinson’s disease research with the validation of the biomarker alpha-synuclein. Researchers have developed a tool called the α-synuclein seeding amplification assay which detects the biomarker in the spinal fluid of people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and individuals who have not shown clinical symptoms.
• Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Two pharmaceuticals have seen FDA approval in the past two years to slow disease progression in individuals with ALS. Relyvrio ® was approved in 2022 and acts by preventing or slowing more neuron cell death in patients with ALS. Tofersen (Qalsody®), an antisense oligonucleotide, was approved in 2023 under the accelerated approval pathway. Tofersen targets RNA produced from mutated superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) genes to eliminate toxic SOD1 protein production. Recently published genetic research on how mutations contribute to ALS is ongoing with researchers recently discovering how NEK1 gene mutations lead to ALS. This discovery suggests a possible rational therapeutic approach to stabilizing microtubules in ALS patients.

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The Most Successful Approaches to Leading Organizational Change

• Deborah Rowland,
• Michael Thorley,
• Nicole Brauckmann

A closer look at four distinct ways to drive transformation.

When tasked with implementing large-scale organizational change, leaders often give too much attention to the what of change — such as a new organization strategy, operating model or acquisition integration — not the how — the particular way they will approach such changes. Such inattention to the how comes with the major risk that old routines will be used to get to new places. Any unquestioned, “default” approach to change may lead to a lot of busy action, but not genuine system transformation. Through their practice and research, the authors have identified the optimal ways to conceive, design, and implement successful organizational change.

Management of long-term, complex, large-scale change has a reputation of not delivering the anticipated benefits. A primary reason for this is that leaders generally fail to consider how to approach change in a way that matches their intent.

• Deborah Rowland is the co-author of  Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works , Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change , and the Still Moving Field Guide: Change Vitality at Your Fingertips . She has personally led change at Shell, Gucci Group, BBC Worldwide, and PepsiCo and pioneered original research in the field, accepted as a paper at the 2016 Academy of Management and the 2019 European Academy of Management. Thinkers50 Radar named as one of the generation of management thinkers changing the world of business in 2017, and she’s on the 2021 HR Most Influential Thinker list. She is Cambridge University 1st Class Archaeology & Anthropology Graduate.
• Michael Thorley is a qualified accountant, psychotherapist, executive psychological coach, and coach supervisor integrating all modalities to create a unique approach. Combining his extensive experience of running P&L accounts and developing approaches that combine “hard”-edged and “softer”-edged management approaches, he works as a non-executive director and advisor to many different organizations across the world that wish to generate a new perspective on change.
• Nicole Brauckmann focuses on helping organizations and individuals create the conditions for successful emergent change to unfold. As an executive and consultant, she has worked to deliver large-scale complex change across different industries, including energy, engineering, financial services, media, and not-for profit. She holds a PhD at Faculty of Philosophy, Westfaelische Wilhelms University Muenster and spent several years on academic research and teaching at University of San Diego Business School.

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• Life Skills

Forgot where you put the keys? Experts (and a trivia buff) share tips to boost memory

Andee Tagle

Margaret Cirino

Where did I put the keys? Tips to improve memory

Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images hide caption

You don't have to be a trivia buff to be great at remembering things.

Monica Thieu , a four-time Jeopardy! contestant and winner of the game's 2012 college championship, uses memory techniques like mnemonic devices and flash cards to retain world capitals, TV shows, Olympic cities and more.

"With practice, absolutely everyone can make their memory stronger," says Thieu, who also researches memory, human cognition and emotion as a postdoctoral scientist at Emory University.

Listen to the podcast episode: Where did I put the keys? Tips to improve memory

That's because memory is selective. What our brains choose to remember is something we can train, says Charan Ranganath , director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, and author of Why We Remember . "It can be biased, warped and reconstructed."

If you want to improve your memory, even if it's just remembering where you parked or where you put your keys, try these science-backed strategies from our experts.

Pay attention to what you want to remember

"The first necessary ingredient in creating a memory that lasts longer than the present moment is attention," says Lisa Genova , a neuroscientist and the author of Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting . "We need that input — otherwise that memory doesn’t get made, even if your eyes see it."

When people gripe about having memory problems, they're often having attention problems, she adds. For example, if you blame your memory because you can't find your parking spot, you probably weren't paying attention to it in the first place. So slow down and focus on what you want to remember.

Don't always depend on GPS. Your sense of direction will thank you

Create a rule and a habit.

If you repeatedly lose track of an object like your keys, wallet or cellphone, pick a designated spot in your home and keep it there when it's not in use, says Genova. That way, you don't have to expend effort trying to remember where you placed it.

"If you put it in the same place every time, you've made it [a fact], sort of like your address and birthday: My keys always go in this bowl. There's a rule and a habit," she says.

The more details the merrier

To form memories you'll naturally keep, make them as immersive as possible, says Thieu. This is especially helpful when you're tackling a subject that you find difficult to connect with.

Let's say you're trying to learn more about the Renaissance era. Commit the period to memory by absorbing information about it through a variety of mediums, says Thieu. Make a playlist of music from the era. Watch period dramas set at that time. And "any time you have an opportunity to learn something in a richer way, do it" — like going to a theater performance on the subject matter.

Our brains love to remember anything that's "meaningful, emotional, surprising or new," says Genova. So the more details you can give your brain to latch onto, the stronger that a memory becomes and the easier it is to recall later.

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Trigger your memory

When your brain creates a memory, it naturally weaves together all the sights, sounds, tastes and smells associated with that memory, says Genova. So use those connections to your advantage.

Let's say you're studying for a vocabulary test. If you always listen to Dua Lipa while you're studying and "have a chance to listen to Dua Lipa while you take the test, it might help you remember those words," says Genova. Psychologists call this process "context-dependent memory."

Genova suggests enhancing your study space with smells, music or certain tastes. Try chewing a piece of cinnamon gum, for example, while you're preparing for a big exam — and then again while you're taking it. Your senses can act as triggers for the rest of your memory to fall into place.

Negotiating isn't just for job offers. Here's how to use it in everyday life

"chunk" long strings of information.

If you have a big load of information to recall at once, Ranganath suggests a strategy that researchers call " chunking ." It's a way to organize longer strings of information to make them easier to recall. Let's say you want to remember the phone number (130) 555-1212. "That’s 10 digits, which is a lot to juggle around in my mind."

So "chunk" it into three parts, he says: 130, 555, 1212. Instead of recalling each number individually, you can recall the entire group — and then retrieve each individual number more easily.

Create a "mind palace"

Need to remember to grab eggs, milk and coffee creamer from the store? Ranganath suggests a method that memory researchers, as well as memory champions, call a "mind palace" — or the method of loci , which means "places" in Latin. You may have seen this ancient mnemonic device on TV shows like Sherlock .

This technique allows you to pair a place you know well, like your childhood home, with new information. Picture yourself placing the items of your grocery list around the house. Place a carton of eggs on your couch. Put milk on the kitchen counter. Put some creamer on the coffee table. Later on at the supermarket, recall this path through your house as you're shopping. It'll help you remember your grocery list.

How to start a new habit: think small

Try good old flash cards.

Don't overlook the power of reviewing flash cards, says Thieu. "Some of the best trivia experts I know do a lot of flash-carding."

Thieu likes to watch old Jeopardy! reruns and create flash cards for the information in each episode. Then, she'll use the cards to quiz herself. She also uses this technique to drill lists of more specific trivia information — say, the world's longest rivers or deepest lakes.

Take your flash-carding one step further by testing yourself before you learn the information, to see what you already know, and then afterward to see what you were able to remember. A pre-lesson test primes your brain for what you'll need to recall later on.

"We learn the most when we challenge ourselves — and that's an extraordinarily powerful tool for retaining information in the long run," says Ranganath.

Go easy on yourself

Lastly, don't expect your memory to be perfect, say our experts. It's normal to occasionally misplace your keys or forget to pay a bill.

"Life is an open-book test," says Genova. You're not cheating if you look something up or write it down. It could save your mental energy for something more meaningful.

The audio portion of this episode was produced by Margaret Cirino. The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected].

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