Best practices / workflow for organizing research for whitepapers

November 15, 2021 11:38 AM

I've been contracted to read affordable housing policy, municipal plans, and census data, and then apply that information to help write RFPs, presentations, and reports. Please give me advice on how to manage the data, sources, and content, so I don't have to start from square 1 each project.

I'm very good at reading and understanding monstrously long PDF's and summarizing the key points, while also summarizing where I think the PDF needs more content or is missing information. I'm exceptional at understanding, but very week on remembering.

I was hired to update a single report, which was pretty easy. Now I'm juggling 5 other whitepapers I'm working on, and it's tough to keep straight what information from which sources apply to which projects. I also have a habit of remembering general ideas but not specifics, so I need a structure that lets me double check my facts before confirming.

The content I use might be PDF's downloaded or emailed to me, data queried from maps and databases which are not able to be downloaded, books, news articles, everything. Right now I've got various info stashed in different places - footnotes on papers in progress, bookmarks, emails, downloaded PDF's, PDF's in different folders in google drive, etc.

I'm looking for a simple, best-practice workflow for organizing all this content in a central place, referencing that content from the papers I'm working on, and recycling the content into future projects.

I'm also interested in any best practices or workflows from the point of view of non-academic or non-scientific research.

posted by rebent to Grab Bag (9 answers total)

How about Zotero or another reference manager? Lets you catalog, archive the material itself, take notes, etc.
posted by hollyholly at 11:43 AM on November 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

I use the bookmark manager Pinboard pretty heavily for this kind of thing - I've saved links to a variety of item types (websites, persistent URLs to database items, documents I've uploaded to Google Drive, etc.) and then use tags and notes on the individual items to establish the connections I need between them. I also use its Notes feature to link in physical items or things that for one reason or another can't be linked to directly, but that are related to the other things, or just to make related notes to myself to think about in the context of the project.

I like its Web 2.0ish, bog simple interface, low cost, and the fact that it almost never goes down.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:12 PM on November 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Seconding Zotero - it's really the only tool you need for something like this. Each project or topic gets its own collection.

Regarding process and workflow, take a look at Raul Pacheco-Vega's website, where he talks quite a bit about best practices, and specifically how he teaches students how to conduct research like this.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 12:44 PM on November 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

Zotero is a great solution. You can use it to store the actual documents or just link to them.
posted by bluedaisy at 12:49 PM on November 15, 2021

You don't specify your platform, but if it's Mac you may want to take a look at DevonThink. Easily search the contents of PDFs, tag, create notes that link to the docs, and - this may be useful even though you hadn't thought about it - find connections between docs in your library.
posted by neilbert at 1:12 PM on November 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

An option I haven't seen mentioned yet is Papers. I used it when I was in grad school. I liked the ability to annotate PDFs within the app and have those annotations sync between my iPad (where I was reading and taking notes) and the Mac app. Looks like it is Multiplatform now, and seems to be a subscription model.

I also think DevonThink is a great option to check out. You asked for workflows; DevonThink has a huge community following and lots of podcasts, YouTube tutorials, etc about workflows. I just bought the MacSparky Field Guide. Also, their blog has a lot of user workflows/use cases.
posted by bluloo at 1:38 PM on November 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'm on PC, but being able to work with folks across platforms is a (low-priority) priority for me :)
posted by rebent at 5:06 AM on November 16, 2021

Ok, Zotero and Papers are cross platform. Papers does have some collaborative features, from what I saw of the new version, but it is paid while Zotero is free.
posted by bluloo at 6:02 AM on November 16, 2021

You might want to check out Scrivener. See the Scrivener features - it's cross-platform (Windows, macOS, iOS) and it runs less than $50 IIRC.

I think it'd be a great tool if you're disciplined enough to use it. My writing is more around short-form than long-form and too scattered to make good use of it.
posted by jzb at 11:43 AM on November 16, 2021