Comments on: How to Build a Paper Research Wiki

By: My knowledge tools | SilverWolf's PhD Blog

My knowledge tools | SilverWolf's PhD Blog — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:07:28 +0000

[...] become even more powerful when used to write papers. By adapting the Cal Newport approach to create paper research wiki. We may structure our research as a [...]

By: casper de tello

casper de tello — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 15:45:46 +0000

Here's a slightly rambling but still great youtube video applying the research wiki technique using Zotero (a free addon for Firefox) which was created by academics for academics to make research easy. It's clearly not just a reference manager. I found it very helpful to see the wiki strategy in use, rather than reading about it. It's much clearer to me how to go about it now. Interestingly, he says that he's sure that he has "radically oversimplified" the strategy from Study Hacks, but I am not so sure since the philosophy here is that of professed 'radical simplicity'. How does your use or application of the strategy jive with this one? Does any of you use Zotero for building a research wiki, or use it but organize things differently? Please share, especially if you have a video, screen shots or anything tangible. A picture is worth 1000 words.

By: Marie Kyle

Marie Kyle — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 02:45:53 +0000

This is such an amazing approach to organizing the paper writing experience. I don’t know how I ended up on your site Cal, but my mind is blown. I have no doubt that your writing wisdom will change the way I approach my writing. As far as using a wiki…I’m very tech savvy, but I agree with the others that think starting a wiki for this task is just overkill. If you’ve got a mac, save up your coffee money for 2 weeks and get Scrivener. Does everything you need a Paper Research Wiki to do, all right out the box, no setup required, AND you can set up multiple ‘wiki’ styled researched situations within a single document. I don’t work for the Scrivener people or anything, just sharing what worked for me.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:26:59 +0000

So now I have gone through all of my sources and extracted the relevant information onto different pages in PBworks. I’m ready to start the structural work, but I’m frustrated at the prospect because many of my sources covered more than one of the ideas within my paper topic. So, when I link back to the primary sources, I will have to comb through the irrelevant quotes for that topic to get the relevant ones. Is there an aspect of this system that I’m not understanding? I’m starting to like your research paper database idea better. Perhaps it would work well to build a research paper database for primary sources, then create a wiki for the second and third levels,pasting the relevant quotes into the ideas and outline pages.

By: Laura

Laura — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:13:04 +0000

I have the same question as Jason–how does this fit in to or correspond to the method in the red book? Do you not make photocopies in this method? I’m a beginning PhD student and just read the red book because I really like this blog, but I’m not sure if the photocopy method would be practical given the number of sources in my research papers. But maybe that makes it even more practical, I’m not sure.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:38:24 +0000

Love it! Just implemented it and blogged about it.

By: Estara

Estara — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:38:15 +0000

Great system! I think I’m going to start learning how to implement that for my senior high research paper, so that when I’m actually in college I will have the system down good!

By: Study Hacks

Study Hacks — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:50:29 +0000

I was wondering what you thought the advantages of a wiki were over say creating a directory structure and tex documents.

When working on mathematics research, I do use latex documents — one per potential problem — as my central organization tool. As you note, the ability to easily render math is essential for this specific type of work.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:05:43 +0000

Hey Cal! Great post here. I have one question though. I assume that due to your math background you are familiar with LaTex. I just started grad school and am brainstorming some ideas for paper tracking. I was wondering what you thought the advantages of a wiki were over say creating a directory structure and tex documents.

I like tex because eventually that is how all my papers and writings will be formatted and published. I also enjoy a good afternoon of vim and tex writing as well, but I see some of the positives about using a wiki. Most notably the fact that you can easily view and navigate the content. What argument would you provide in choosing the wiki over something like a good latex set up? I would also be interested to see your response to the comparison of using Evernote rather than a wiki as well.

Thanks for any comments and suggestions!

By: R.

R. — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:44:43 +0000

Thanks for this wiki post, this is great! I have been all over the place with my dissertation notes and all the word docs I use to house them, and this sounds like a great way to organize and structure things better. I’m not at all familiar with wiki, but I’m going to go give this a try. Thank you!