I usually follow this procedure for reviewing academic papers and acquiring state-of-the-art knowledge about a certain research topic.

  1. Perform a quick reading of each collected paper, mainly focusing on abstract, introduction, conclusions and key figures and tables. Take notes for key points into an Org document which is specially created for this topic, instead of putting these notes into a centralized note file — at the moment, I maintain and visit this file via the Emacs package org-ref. This is because the purpose at the moment is to study a specific topic, not an aimless ramble reading and it is mandatory to group them together into an independent document.
  2. Assign tags to the associated bibliography items in the Zotero library.
  3. (Optional) Create mindmaps in Freeplane to reorganize, categorize and interconnect those papers with their key points.
  4. (Optional) Create tables in LibreOffice to compare those papers from various perspectives.
  5. Archive the notes taken down in the Org document for the current research topic into the centralized note file. The aim is to treat it as an information database for quick searching and easy accessing in the furture. For example, whenever we click or press C-c C-o on a citation link in Org mode, its associated notes can be instantly displayed in a buffer.

N.B. Step 1~4 can be either in sequence or parallel. The above workflow should also be a multi-pass procedure.

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