We like our referencing here on Less Wrong. Reference-heavy people (gwern, Yvain, lukeprog, I’m looking at you), do you have some system for keeping track of your common go-to references that you use over and over again in multiple pieces of work?
I’m kind of expecting “yes, I have a dirty great text file” as a response to this, but perhaps hoping for something more awesome.
I’m not super reference heavy but I myself use evernote quite a lot.
Whenever I find something that I probably want to reference in the future I clip it into evernote.
Evernote has the advantage that there a google plugin that searches through your evernote everytime you do a google search. Finding a reference again takes searching. Sometimes more sometimes less.
If you want to reduce the time it takes you to refind information, evernote tags or simple hashtags help.
Back in Google Reader days Google Reader search was also quite central, because I often used to quote stuff that came into my RSS feed on some way.
If you want to go more high tech there are options like http://www.mendeley.com/ to manage references.
Zotero and CiteULike are similar solutions that are specifically designed for references management.
I personally still use Evernote over single purpose reference management systems because I can simply dumb all information that I might need later into evernote.
Evernote happens to be a cloud service of a US company, so it not 100% secure for all types of information. If I could get a similar service that’s hosted safely I would switch, but at the moment convenience wins over data privacy for myself for most data.
There also information that so important that I want to have it available in brain memory. That information goes into Anki.
Seconding Evernote for managing both citations and information in general.
The ability to tag content is indispensable, and combined with a powerful search, Evernote becomes an external hard drive for your brain.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is one of those things that becomes progressively more useful the more you use it and invest in it (e.g., clip anything of interest, tag religiously).
I second the recommendation of using Evernote for saving references and Anki (or other spaced repetition software) for brain storage.
As for Google Reader, I miss it a lot, but I’ve found that feedly is a full replacement. Subscribing to pro I now save everything I read there directly to Evernote since it offers integration with it.
I’m writing a literature review at the moment, and use Evernote to organize the references. I tag them with year, subject, type, language. I give each reference a number. I abbreviate the conclusions of the references in the notes that contain the original articles as pdf files, and will finally use those snippets to construct the review article.
We like our referencing here on Less Wrong. Reference-heavy people (gwern, Yvain, lukeprog, I’m looking at you), do you have some system for keeping track of your common go-to references that you use over and over again in multiple pieces of work?
I’m kind of expecting “yes, I have a dirty great text file” as a response to this, but perhaps hoping for something more awesome.
I’m not super reference heavy but I myself use evernote quite a lot.
Whenever I find something that I probably want to reference in the future I clip it into evernote.
Evernote has the advantage that there a google plugin that searches through your evernote everytime you do a google search. Finding a reference again takes searching. Sometimes more sometimes less. If you want to reduce the time it takes you to refind information, evernote tags or simple hashtags help.
Back in Google Reader days Google Reader search was also quite central, because I often used to quote stuff that came into my RSS feed on some way.
If you want to go more high tech there are options like http://www.mendeley.com/ to manage references. Zotero and CiteULike are similar solutions that are specifically designed for references management.
I personally still use Evernote over single purpose reference management systems because I can simply dumb all information that I might need later into evernote.
Evernote happens to be a cloud service of a US company, so it not 100% secure for all types of information. If I could get a similar service that’s hosted safely I would switch, but at the moment convenience wins over data privacy for myself for most data.
There also information that so important that I want to have it available in brain memory. That information goes into Anki.
Seconding Evernote for managing both citations and information in general.
The ability to tag content is indispensable, and combined with a powerful search, Evernote becomes an external hard drive for your brain.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is one of those things that becomes progressively more useful the more you use it and invest in it (e.g., clip anything of interest, tag religiously).
I second the recommendation of using Evernote for saving references and Anki (or other spaced repetition software) for brain storage.
As for Google Reader, I miss it a lot, but I’ve found that feedly is a full replacement. Subscribing to pro I now save everything I read there directly to Evernote since it offers integration with it.
Do you mean manual saving of posts or is there a setting to automatically redirect all posts into a special Evernote notebook?
Manual saving, there is a keyboard shortcut and clickable icon that saves whatever you are reading to Evernote.
It does? Awesome!
I’m writing a literature review at the moment, and use Evernote to organize the references. I tag them with year, subject, type, language. I give each reference a number. I abbreviate the conclusions of the references in the notes that contain the original articles as pdf files, and will finally use those snippets to construct the review article.
A dirty great text file is awesome: http://xkcd.com/208/
Yes, seriously.