Help needed for sorting scientific papers

Hello everybody,

I have several hundred scientific papers which I would like to sort according to their topics and put them in fitting groups. Is there a good possibility DT could help me with this? Maybe the AI? Any advice is appreciated. I am willing to experiment a little by myself but it would be great if someone could show me the broad direction.

Thank you! :slight_smile:

For what it’s worth, I’ve been curating a DTPO database for over 10 years that strictly contains journal articles (just over 3900).

The database itself is actually an index of a single folder on my hard drive. So, I do not import articles directly into the database. I recall agonising all those years ago with exactly the same question you raise. I ultimately settled on sorting articles in a single folder by journal title rather than year, author, subject, etc. This made the initial allocation of an article to a group/folder easier (well, for me, anyway). From there, I would let DTPO update the index, and I now rely on DTPO’s built-in ‘see also’ to help me find articles similar to the one I’m viewing. As well, tagging lets me group by topic, year, author, etc. (even those my use of tagging is minimal and temporary, as discussed elsewhere in the forum).

In hindsight, I’m happy with my decision as it gives me flexibility in terms of the primary storage of all of those articles (on my hard drive, but indexed in DTPO) but allows for operational flexibility for how they are utilised, marked up and (re)grouped (through DTPO).

To add to chatoyer’s comments: If you index files, they will be excluded from classification by default, ie. they won’t be suggested locations in the See Also & Classify drawer. You can open Tools > Show Info for the group and deselect this option, if desired (though I am not necessarily advocating chatoyer’s method as the only approach).

Also, realize the AI learns, just as a real-world assistant learns. It’s not going to just magically figure out what structure you want (which assuredly would differ from the structure others would create) and start filing things. You need to file things manually and as you file things, connections will become clearer and clearer to the AI. Over time, the suggestions should become more accurate to how you are organizing your data.

Alritght, thank you for the input. I think I’ll keep the files in DTPO (as I need them in DTTG), file some of them by hand and then see where the AI takes me. :slight_smile:

Sounds good. Cheers!

Excellent. Have fun! As you start to amass, you will really see the power of DTPO. Absolutely indispensable for me these days.