Tag: Research
A Plea for Scholarly Engagement
Steve Runge has posted a fantastic essay on “The Bane of Dismissive Scholarship.” Among his most poignant statements are the following: [T]he literature review and preparation for writing the paper. . . . is where I should be adding to my already profound arsenal of Knowledge, filling my cup til it runneth over. Realistically, I…
Creating Research Timelines in Excel
Although it certainly can be used otherwise, a progress tracking system like the one Paul Silvia suggests in his book How to Write a Lot seems to work best for writing that can be open ended: by following a regular writing schedule, projects can regularly and reliably come to completion. What happens, however, if one is working…
Tracking Writing Progress
In How to Write a Lot (affiliate disclosure), Paul Silvia provides his own progress monitoring system as an example (39–45). Since finishing the book last month, I have been adapting Silvia’s database format to a Google Docs spreadsheet that will track some additional data in addition to the data that he finds helpful. Since it…
“How to Write a Lot”
Paul J. Silvia teaches psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. InHow to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Silvia chiefly pleads with his readers to set aside specific, regular blocks of time for writing and to adhere steadfastly to this schedule (16–17). “The secret,” he says, “is the regularity,…
Zotero 2 Beta Launches
Zotero is a bibliographic and research management addin for the Firefox web browser. The latest test release, 2.0b3, succeeds Zotero 1.5b2.1 with some substantial improvements, particularly by increasing Zotero’s flexibility and usefulness for research collaboration among several, different Zotero users. In addition to the resources on Zotero’s website, Tommy Keene has a good quickstart guide…
PDF Markup Tool
I recently found a thread on the Zotero forum that mentions the PDF XChange Viewer, which is supposed to allow users to markup PDF files. Especially if you use Zotero, you may want to use PDF XChange as your default PDF browser plugin. After installing PDF XChange, you may still need to do the following:…