First, add comments to the PDF document.
With the new version of Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader, you can add comments to PDF documents. Take Adobe Reader as an example, click the yellow tool icons "Add Comment" and "Highlight Text" on the toolbar. In the figure below, first highlight a paragraph of text, then right-click the highlighted text with a yellow background, and select Open Pop-up Annotation from the right-click menu to add annotation text. This function helps to leave notes when reading documents, which is convenient for later tracing. In the following example, I added Chinese definitions to the title and abstract of the document respectively. When you have finished all the comments, press the Save button on the toolbar to save them in the original PDF document together with all the comments.
Second, organize the literature with mind map.
1. Build a document structure diagram
Mind mapping is a tool for thinking in images, and it is also a tool for expressing thinking by using auxiliary means of thinking in images. The use of a central keyword or idea leads to visual construction and classified ideas; It uses a central keyword or idea to connect all representative words, ideas, tasks or other related projects into a radial line, and expresses people's thoughts in different ways, such as quotation, visualization, system construction, classification, etc., and is widely used in research, organization, problem solving and policy making. A mind map has a central theme and sub-theme icons extending along it. Like a tree, its visual structure makes many people learn more efficiently.
This paper introduces a mind mapping tool Docear (official pronunciation: dog-ear) specially designed for researchers. Its predecessor was SciPlore MindMapping. Docear is open source software and can be downloaded for free. It supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS to manage documents graphically. Please refer to the user manual page for the detailed operation guide of the software. Docear can monitor new files in folders. Using this feature, we can list all PDF files in the mind map. Whenever a new PDF is found on the Internet and stored on the hard disk, it will be immediately displayed in the existing mind map.
After the installation is completed, select the "New" item in the "File" menu to start creating a new mind map. Click "New Mind Map" in the center of the screen, and select "Monitoring"-"Add Monitoring Folder" from the right mouse button menu to open the "Save Map" window. After setting a file name for the new mind map and saving it, the "Select a directory containing PDF files" dialog box will pop up, and you can select a folder to store the document. The following figure shows the mind map folded (Alt+Page Up) to the last branch, which directly corresponds to the name of my subfolder.
After all nodes are expanded (Alt+Page Down), the picture will be displayed as a large chart. As can be seen from the following figure, the second-level node corresponds to the file name of the document, while the third-level node has different internal structures (title, author, paragraph, caption, etc.) of some PDF documents due to different structures of the PDF documents. ) can also be expanded. Note that the Chinese part in the picture below is the PDF notes I added to it, which means that all the important notes we added to the PDF document when reading the literature can be included in the mind map generated by Docear.
2. Reorganize the organizational structure of literature
Click "New Mind Map" in the center of the map and press "Insert" on the keyboard to insert a new node. In this example, the new node is named "Alert", and then the documents originally located under other nodes are moved to the newly created "Alert" node by cutting, copying, pasting and other functions in the right-click menu. Through this operation, researchers can freely re-establish the organizational structure of documents, and the same document can appear under two nodes with different organizational methods (or themes). For example, we can organize our own document structure by classifying the content, type, importance, read and unread documents, which has incomparable advantages compared with the way folders organize documents.
3. Other functions
If you add new notes to literature reading, you can also import them into existing mind maps. Click the node corresponding to the document in the map and select PDF”- Import New Annotation from the right-click menu to complete the operation.
Select "Edit Comments in Dialog Box" from the right-click menu of the document node, and add comments to the document in the pop-up window. Comments are only saved in the mind map instead of the PDF document, and the added comments have a hovering effect in the mind map.
Thirdly, obtain the citation information of literature.
When writing a thesis or project application, it is necessary to indicate the source of the cited literature. If you don't do a good job of indexing in your daily work, you will be very depressed. The method introduced in this paper is to retrieve the downloaded literature and automatically complete the acquisition and collation of literature citation information. Zotero is a free software based on Firefox browser. As a plug-in of Firefox, Zotero helps to automatically obtain information such as author, abstract, journal, meeting, volume, page and date when searching online documents. Zotero supports all online literature databases in the list. In addition, you can also get information about books directly on Amazon. This page lists Zotero's operation points in the form of video clips to help users quickly master its operation points.
1. Software installation
First, you need to download and install Firefox, my favorite web browser! Run Firefox after completion, enter the download address of Zotero in the address bar of Firefox, and click "Zotero 3.0.3 for Firefox" in the opened page, and Firefox will automatically perform the installation process. The Zotero icon will appear in the lower right corner of Firefox after installation.
2. Software use
Use Firefox to open the document retrieval page, as shown in the figure below, which is IEEE Xplore. The retrieval work is the same as the general operation. Filter articles of interest by keywords, and then open the target document details page to download PDF documents. Note that a small white icon similar to a document entry will appear on the right side of the browser address bar, as shown in the figure below, which is located in the center of the red wireframe and to the left of the small green umbrella icon. Move the mouse over this small white icon, and a prompt "Save to Zotero" will appear.
Click this white icon, and a prompt box "Save entry …" will appear in the lower right corner of the browser in a short time, which means that the relevant information of this document, including the abstract, has been collected in Zotero. Clicking on the "Zotero" icon in the lower right corner of Firefox browser will open Zotero's window at the bottom of the browser, which lists all the collected literature information items.
In addition, you can choose to download and install a standalone version of Zotero, in which case Zotero will run independently of Firefox.
3. Citation of export documents
This is the best part of Zotrow. Use Ctrl+ left mouse button to select multiple documents to be exported in the Zotero main window list, and select "Generate Document Directory from Selected Items …" in the right-click menu. A small window will pop up. Select "IEEE" in the reference style and "Copy to Clipboard" in the output format. How to repay with "OK"? At this time, we copy the contents of the clipboard to any text editing work, including Notepad and Word, and after a little sorting, we can get the standard literature citation information that meets the IEEE publishing standards.
4. insufficient
At present, Zotero doesn't support the domestic Chinese literature database well, and it doesn't fully support "China HowNet", so there is a problem of missing data. What makes people angry is that "VIP" itself does not support Firefox, so all Zotero are not a problem.
Fourth, Zotero cooperates with Docear.
The document information obtained by Zotero is imported into Docear, so that the basic information of the document becomes the attribute of the document node in Docear, so that researchers can obtain the comprehensive information of the document, including the abstract, just by opening the document mind map.
First, select the list of documents to be exported to Docear in the Zotero main window, and then select File-Export Library … to open the Export … window. Select "BibTeX" in the format drop-down box, and check "Export Notes". After OK, you need to enter the saving path of the exported BibTeX file. At this time, it is suggested to set the path to "User Path \ docear _ Workspace \ _ Data \ Profiles \ Default" (this path is the data directory set by users when installing doc ear), and the saved file name is docear.bib At this time, the Reference window on the right side of Docear will prompt "File' Docear". Bib' has been externally modified! ",click the" Review and Modify "button, and click" OK "in the pop-up window to complete the import operation of literature-related information.
Drag the document information in the Reference window on the right side of Docear to the corresponding document node in the mind map to realize the association (as shown in the following figure). Document-related information exists as an attribute of a document node, and it follows all the cutting, copying and pasting operations of the document.