I often meet researchers who are unhappy with their bibliographic referencing tool, but are put off by the potential faff. They imagine it would be as much fun as changing banks. Well, if you’re thinking of moving from Mendeley to Zotero, I have good news: it’s very easy. There are two main methods. Let’s look at them in turn. Method 1 - Export a RIS file from Mendeley A RIS file is a format that allows citation tools to exchange data. ...
Google’s NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that helps you analyse your own content in almost any format, including Google Docs, PDFs, videos, and audio files. You create virtual notebooks for each topic or research area, then upload relevant documents. NotebookLM creates a custom dataset (or searchable knowledge base) from those files that you can then query. Unlike other chatbots, the responses are based on the content that you provided. And those responses include citations to the original passages - you know exactly where that answer has come from. The other big advantage of NotebookLM is that it can handle up to fifty 500,000-word documents. That’s a total of 25m words! Even if you’re a prolific note-taker like me, you’d struggle to exceed its capacity. ...
Although I have mixed feelings about the advent of AI, improved transcription tools have made my life a lot easier. Dictating rather than typing is much better for my creaky body, and it’s incredibly quick to generate high quality transcripts and captions for videos. A few years ago, it would take me almost a week to transcribe the content for an online course - now it’s less than an hour. ...
When I did my PhD, I had notes in about 15 different places. I mostly got away with it, because I was younger and had the energy to charge around the house in pursuit of a specific source. Nowadays, I have to adopt a more dignified approach. Fortunately, Readwise is here to help me. Readwise makes it easy to capture, organise, and revisit highlights from whatever you’re reading, whether that’s ebooks, articles, or physical books. You can also add comments while you highlight, so you’re less likely to forget those important insights. ...
I always start with good intentions when I’m reading: “This time, I’ll take careful notes as I go along, rather than imagining I’ll somehow remember the important bits.” In reality, I’m trying to balance a cup of tea and book, so can’t possibly manage my writing materials, too. Happily, AudioPen has solved at least one of my problems. AudioPen is an AI-based app that turns your voice notes into structured, edited text. Any repetitions or ums and ahhs are automatically eliminated, and it adds all the punctuation. That two-minute ramble is turned into a perfectly respectable paragraph. You can then organise your transcribed notes with folders and tags. For instance, you might have a folder for a specific research project, then a tag for each related book or article you read. It’s not quite hands-free, but using AudioPen can be less disruptive than physically writing. There are well-known benefits to using pen and paper, but recording and transcribing a voice note is better than not making any notes at all. ...
When I talk to academics about LinkedIn, the most common word I hear is “grubby,” swiftly followed by “timesink”. Although networking is vital for most of us, these platforms are designed to keep us clicking like eejits all day long. You don’t get funding for reaching an impressive number of likes, and it’s easy to lose half a day when you intended to spend just five minutes. In this post, I’ll explain some tactics for making the most of LinkedIn without letting it gobble up your precious time or your soul. ...
In my previous post, I explained several options for managing your Zotero storage. If you’re willing to install a plugin, there’s another solution: Zotmoov. If you’ve been using Zotero for a while, you’ve probably heard of Zotfile, a popular plugin that allowed users to automatically organise PDFs and keep them synced through cloud storage. Unfortunately, Zotfile is no longer maintained and doesn’t work with Zotero 7. The good news is that Zotmoov offers some of the same features, while others are now a core part of Zotero 7. ...
If you’ve been merrily saving ebooks, journal articles, and web snapshots to Zotero, you might run out of storage space. There’s a limit to how much you can sync for free. In this post, I’ll explain how to check your storage limit, how to save storage space, and how to increase the space. The current limit is 300Mb, which usually equates to a few hundred PDFs. Once you’ve reached this threshold, you need to pay an annual subscription before you can sync any more data. You’ll see an exclamation mark next to your sync icon. ...
If there’s one word that encapsulates the prevailing mood right now, it’s “uncertainty”. Not that life was ever certain (only its end), but it’s much harder to grasp even fleeting moments of stability. As William Gibson expressed it in his novel Pattern Recognition, “For us … things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ’now’ to stand on.” We aren’t living in “times of unprecedented change,” as people are fond of claiming. What’s unprecedented is the pace of that change. When I worked in the world of software engineering, whatever I learned in the morning was often obsolete by tea time. It feels as though that dizziness has engulfed everything. No doubt this is because tech companies are largely driving that pace of change. What we need, I think, are ways of expanding that sense of “now”. ...
We’ve all attended meetings where there’s been a lot of noise, but very little to show for it at the end. The discussion is dominated by a member with one terrible idea that they’re determined to force upon everyone. The quieter colleagues who actually have something valuable to say slump in defeat and start wondering what they’re going to have for dinner. The only outcome is agreement on the date for the next exhausting meeting. ...