Reading the Literature
I’m slowly making my way through my journal Table of Content RSS feeds. I suppose I should make this weekly habit, so that I can keep up without being swamped. I’m all caught up in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Biology, Nature, Cell, and Science, for example, but I still have PNAS and Molecular Systems Biology to get through, not to mention the quantitative biology section of arXiv. Mostly, I’m just reading abstracts. Every once in a while, I find a paper I find interesting enough to skim, and sometimes they’re so interesting (and short enough!) that I read them. But I haven’t read a full paper in a long, long time.
I’ve been trying out different workflows to see what sticks for reading the literature, and actually I’ve found a great program, Papers, for reading and keeping all my PDFs organized. I used to use a workflow that centered around BibDesk, downloading PDFs, importing the citation into BibDesk and linking it to the PDF, and so on. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world; actually, the best part was being able to tag papers and group them into various subjects. The metadata handling with BibDesk is pretty good.
Now, though, I think I’m slowly converting to Papers (still in Beta), which is integrated with Pubmed to allow one to download citations and organize PDFs. Papers resembles iTunes and NetNewsWire, in a way, which I guess is a complement. It’s still quite buggy and very beta, though; it’s sometimes lost a few of my PDFs, crashed a couple of times, froze a few times, and so on. Overall, the workflow is much simpler here than it was with BibDesk. There’s less “stuff” to deal with, subjectively, in terms of the user interface. It’s definitely a lot less painful to organize my PDFs now. If the next few releases increase the stability significantly and iron out some of the weirdness with losing PDFs (and maybe some user interface cleanup), I’d be quite willing to shell out money for it.
