For my articles and research, I come across a lot of information. I don’t always have time to read an interesting article or paper immediately. My newest way of collecting, sorting and saving information is the program Evernote. This is a cross platform notebook solution, which also has some very useful expansions.
In Evernote, I created a couple of categories for my different areas of interest. When I come across a nice article on the internet, and want to save it, I use the Clearly plugin to first get rid of any distracting elements on the webpage. Then I use Clearly’s “Save to Evernote” functionality to save purely the article, to the category that matches its subject. Then I add tags to the freshly created note, to be able to find it more quickly (and also link it to other notes).
For creating my own research articles and papers, I usually use LyX, a flexible text editor which supports LaTeX, and is mainly directed towards functionality when writing. You mark certain lines as for example an item list, a section, a subsection, a title, a footnote, etcetera. You can add labels, crossreferences, floats, images, and more. When you’re finished writing, you can start thinking about the looks of your document, choose the font, the paragraph style and decide on margin sizes. I adore this program, because it’s so versatile, and much clearer than Word. Plus, the typesetting is LaTeX-like, very pretty and good for showing things like formulas. You can export to lots of different formats, like PDF, LaTeX, PS, etcetera. You can also convert to RTF format.
What do you use to keep track of interesting information? I’d love to know!