Schedule a research methodology collaboration hour (how to do research on Google Scholar, etc.)

[kallewesterling]

@f-rower adding you here as I think you were the one who spoke to this in our meeting. Not sure if it's something we want to pursue, so feel free to administer (or close) this issue as you see fit :D

[dingaaling]

An initial question on this @f-rower or any who have a method for this! Do you have a "place" you go to to store/organise your literature back log?

[aranas]

I understand you don't mean a reference manager like mendeley or zotero, where you could in principle create a dedicated folder, but specifically how to have an efficient the back log? I find that my literature backlogs usually become graveyards. I've now started to attach links to readings directly with notes on the project I think they'd be relevant for (in obsidian). This way I am more likely to re-discover a paper in context than going through a daunting list that is growing faster than I can read.

[dingaaling]

Thanks for the clarifying qs, @aranas! Your method sounds great, but do you think it would work as a team resource where our "in context" spaces may be different? Criteria I have in mind are:

• Shared space for RAM team to view/collaboratively take notes on relevant articles
• Organised by different RAM focus areas (e.g. Open Source sustainability, participatory methods)
• (And I really like your point of) some structure enabling rediscovery (avoiding long list)

For example, I quite like what Ruth did with the clim-recal lit review, but Google Sheets it is essentially a long list as well

[f-rower]

@dingaaling here is my two cents on this topic:

I have used Zotero relatively successfully for storing and organising literature backlogs, and maximising rediscovery.

Zotero is quite powerful in the sense that you can save documents, website snapshots, and journal papers alike within your folder. To each of these, you can assign tags and write rich text notes, which is really helpful for information recall and understanding the relevance of the paper to your query. One of my favourite items is that you can "tag" related content to each item in your database, which I have found very helpful for cross-referencing text.

I know it's a reference manager, but I also think Zotero can very easily be repurposed as a knowledge management and information distribution tool with that system. Also, Zotero is open source, which is great. The only downside is that free cloud storage is limited to 300Mb of free storage, after which you have to pay $20 a year to upgrade to 2 GB

My suggested idea would be to have a shared RAM Zotero account where we keep our literature.

[dingaaling]

Scheduled for 19 January 10AM