journal articles and pdfs vs rtfs

DEVONthink Scenarios
1

Hi,
Hi I’m a science graduate student and I’ve been using DTP to organize and quickly access lab methods as well as to organize scientific journal articles.

In the past with journal articles I used bibdesk to organize articles by topic (single topic, no tree) and would highlight paragraphs of interest. I found this wasen’t useful for integrating information and I often forgot what I read.

Since I began using DT to manage articles I’ve been finding the online full-text version and selecting the text. Then creating a rtf. I’ve tried this approach because in the past I’ve found pdfs a pain annotate and adobe programs slow on my computer and preview lacked options.

Viewing articles in rtf is nice because:
-database has same info as with pdfs but smaller size
-with rtfs you can fairly easily open each figure to view along side the text
-also you can directly modify the document and copy text with out worrying about copy problems that can happen with the 2 column format of pdfs (ie: doesn’t copy columns sequentially and text gets jumbled).

Is there any pit files in saving journal articles using rtfs instead of pdfs? I haven’t used the classify/see also function very often yet because my database is still quite small. For these functions would it be better to have journal articles in pdf or rtf or does it not matter in the least.

Also, would you say it would be advantageous to have have all papers in a separate database. Would this increase the performance of the the classify/see also functions?

Thanks,

Dylan

2

Assuming that the text of the documents is identical, then the format doesn’t matter. But if the PDF document is a static representation of the original webpage containing lots of noise like headers, footers, navigation & ads, then the results might be worse.

That’s the reason why I’m always capturing the interesting stuff as RTF(D) and why DEVONagent 2.5 is going to remember the last used selection per site. That way you don’t have to select the interesting stuff all the time, just capture it.