The One Weird Secret of Productivity Tools for Researchers

Organizing PDFs, using multiple devices, remembering the name of that one really good paper, collaborating on writing with colleagues... how do researchers do it? What’s efficient for them? The University of Minnesota Libraries’ Personal Information Management Collaborative tasked its Productivity Tools and Citation Managers sub-groups to find out. Productivity Tools asked librarians what they’ve been hearing from users. The Citation Managers Group surveyed graduate students on their citation managers. The one weird secret is that there’s no one weird secret. Instead, researchers use tools that cumulatively meet most of their needs. We’ve spent the last several months playing with many of these tools and now you get the benefit of our exploration of tools such as DevonThink, Circus Ponies Notebook, ReadCube, Draft and NoodleTools. … We will cover how they work, what researchers like about them and to what degree they interact with institutionally provided tools like library databases, Google Apps for Education and other major commercial software like Dropbox and Endnote