My name is Emmanuel Katto. I’ve recently started using DEVONthink to manage my academic research materials, and I am looking for tips on optimizing my workflow. Specifically, I have a few questions:
What are the best practices for organizing research documents, articles, and notes within DEVONthink?
How can I effectively use tags and smart groups to enhance my information retrieval for specific research projects?
Are there any automation features or scripts you recommend for streamlining my research process, especially when dealing with large volumes of PDFs and annotations?
I appreciate any insights or strategies you can share from your own experiences!
You don’t say what field you are working in, nor the level you are at. Different fields may have very different requirements, and whether you are doing a PhD, lecturing or writing a book may also influence the way you need to work. If you give a little more information, that will help people to help you.
“Best practice for organizing” is a broad question that depends on the project. My rule of thumb is to emulate, electronically in DEVONthink, what your best productive inclinations are for organizing paper materials. How would you organize books, original source documents, notes, image, maps, references, etc.? If you are using a reference manager – Bookends, Zotero – there are numerous threads here already.
I know it is simple to ask for new answers in the forum, but I’ll guarantee you if you dive into the rich variety of dialogs here on research topics then you’ll be better able to ask questions. about the precise activities you need help on. Take advantage of the hundreds of hours of effort contributors here have already made.
A lot depends on your DT and MacOS literacy. I am a longtime user who has never started with scripting; but there are some brilliantly gifted users online here who get a lot of mileage out of automation and customisations. These things may quickly overwhelm.
So I would say you don’t need to start big. Start small: create one database, make an informed decision about indexing versus importing, add some resources, really think about what workflow would suit your academic practice. Think about what sort of resources you collect, and what you need to get out of them; how often; in what formats. Read the manual a lot, and press all the buttons (well, most of them…) It’s really hard, if not impossible, to build a system around all of your current and future needs from scratch. Rather, let DT grow around you as your needs become more varied and more demanding over time.
Have fun, too .
And let us know what you are working on. Always good to meet a fellow academic user, and there are many here on the forum.
.