“Is maintaining a personal blog a good way to keep track of one's research?” Forum.
Source: https://www.quora.com/Is-maintaining-a-personal-blog-a-good-way-to-keep-track-of-ones-research
Forum Question: I'am just starting out as a Grad student, and I find that I need to keep track of ideas and new concepts that I keep coming across in an organized manner. A friend suggested keeping a journal. Is having a personal blog a good way to implement this?
-11 Answers-
1) Rishabh Jain, MIT PhD, Imperial MSE, UPenn undergrad
--> Answered Mar 24, 2015
I think you should answer this question by first asking what you want to accomplish. Shriram Krishnamurthi argues that the greatest value to him comes from committing ideas to paper. For me, the most useful reason to keep track of ideas was so I could refer to them over the course of my PhD. Most importantly, when it came time to writing a paper, to be able to find relevant results easily. So you might have your own reasons, and this will certainly be field dependent.
Regardless of how you choose to document your ideas and work, I would strongly recommend that you think about what are the most important common themes of your work and link your 'documents' or 'ideas' accordingly. A simple example is if you are an organic chemist, perhaps the relevant strategy is to organize your work by molecule (whether that is a folder, a single document, or a blog 'topic'). So try to be exhaustive in how you will want to refer to it in the future and 'save' it in that fashion.
Finally, to the blog point specifically, I think that as long as you can create thoughtful tags and links between 'posts,' that using a blog will be very effective. As a plug, this issue was one of the big motivations for creating Open Lab, we enable you to create links between your thoughts and data sets arbitrarily so it is easy and fast to find and store your ideas/results! We are hard at work building a beta that we can deploy, but please feel free to follow us on twitter for updates (@openlab_app)--> *Personal Note: Sadly, this app seems to be defunct.*
-Are there any good personal blog?How do researchers keep track of all of their ideas?How do you keep track of research and developments in your field?How can professors in universities, especially top schools like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, publish so many papers per year?Is it a good thing to make a personal blog?
2) Shriram Krishnamurthi, Professor of Computer Science, Brown University
--> Updated Apr 1, 2015
First of all, congratulations on realizing this. Far too many students go through too many years of graduate school without ever coming to this realization. The fact that you did early on will serve you well.
By blogging, I assume a private blog. Maybe you even mean a public blog. However, before you go down the latter path, make sure you talk to your advisor and confirm that they're okay with you publicizing everything you're working on. They may have good reasons for you to not do so (some of which are obvious and apply to everyone, some of which may be specific to their projects).
Next, by blogging I wonder you really mean blogging in the conventional sense. I stopped blogging because blogs are focused on temporal order, but so often the things I want to write about are not temporally meaningful: i.e., blogs induce a false temporality. They also make it slightly annoying to add forward pointers from older material. You should consider whether, say, a wiki would be better, because a better organization may be to have a collection of tightly interlinked pages.
Next, ask yourself whether the technology is at the right point. Depending on your subject, it may be onerous, painful, or even impossible to get the right notations, markup, etc. in a conventional blogging platform. Do you really want to spend all your time fighting with stupid markup and/or the hideous posting interfaces of some blogging systems? The more painful it is the less you'll feel like writing at all, which is the opposite of the intended effect.
So what is the real value you might get out of "blogging"? There is a very real one: it's that committing ideas to prose forces you to clarify them. I find it's much easier to think incoherent thoughts than to write them. Especially if you share the blog with someone who might read it—a group mate or even your advisor—you're forced to think more clearly. In fact, I advised a student long-distance who I forced, once a week, to post a message to a private Posterous (RIP) board—it had a great interface (just email to an address, attach a variety of formats, etc.). He kept it up for a while and it was good, but then he lost the habit.
Of course, you can get this value from other media too. For instance, buying a notebook and writing it in could be just as good, maybe even better if you are in a subject where presentation on the Web is painful (writing a lot of math, drawing a lot of organic compounds, etc.). It's also very easy to sketch out things (for any discipline) on paper. Of course, you lose the benefits of sharing—unless you photograph and upload images of the notebook pages (don't laugh, this is a perfectly sensible thing to do).
So, step back and ask yourself some key questions. Whom is this for? Who will read it? Is it temporal? Will it be tightly interlinked? Will the computer get in the way of writing and cause me to not write as much? Etc. Answering all these will help you figure out for yourself what medium and format is best. But either way, do something. It'll be a great practice.
[Personal aside. As a grad student, I had a file in my research directory in which I wrote down ideas. No blog, just a big ol' file of ASCII text. Most times that I added something, I also went back and cleaned up some of the old entries, etc.
I picked off very few of them in grad school, but when I accepted a faculty position, I felt this was finally my chance to attack all the ideas I'd been writing down and curating for so long. Then I hit on two new problems, one just before finishing up and the other on the drive from my grad school institution to my work institution.
You can see where this is going: I never even opened that file again, and have long since lost it. But there was no harm in writing any of it down anyway!]
3) Shenoy Handiru, 3rd year of my PhD journey !
-->Answered Mar 30, 2015
If your intention is to just to keep track of your research progress, then I would recommend a simple cloud-based software. Personally, I use Evernote as a daily journal.
There is a blogging assistance tool as well -https://github.com/matigo/Notewo..., If you want to organize your ideas, you can have different notebooks within Evernote with appropriate labels/tags. For ex: I have a notebook named "Daily journal" where I write my ideas and literature review of papers that I read (almost everyday).
In my opinion, Evernote is one of the must-have tools for researchers. It comes very handy, where you can record the audio during your lab meeting and post it in Evernote. You can take the snapshots of presentation slides of others (ex: lab meeting/ conference/ workshop etc.) and sync it with Evernote.
I apologize if my answer sounded like an advertisement of Evernote. But, trust me, you will not regret using Evernote to organize your research progress.
4) Pavao Pahljina, Philosopher & Entrepreneur.
--> Answered Mar 23, 2015
For the last 4 months, I have been writing a journal every single day. Journal is a place to simply "dump" your brain, but it has to make it easy for you. I've tried journaling using MS Word, Notepad, Evernote, Wordpress blog on private, various paper notebooks... but nothing really stuck. I would keep going for a few days, and then give up.That is until I found the perfect place for this kind of continuous "get ideas in writing" endeavour.
Ideal journal.It's a simple little site 750 Words - Write every day. But it is amazing because of it's underlying gamification mechanism that makes you motivated to keep your journal up to date. And it is extremely fast and clean to use. Try it out. Later you can extract and organise everything you wrote and sort it out for research papers.
5) Ferdinand Brueggemann, runs a Wordpress blog since 2004.
--> Updated Jul 29, 2015
I guess it depends on your field of study. If you just write down well published stuff for your own records a blog doesn't make much sense.
a) blogs are highly static. You can't work well with the memos afterwards (reorganize, sort, restructure, e.g.
b) If you have a lot of entries it's cumbersome to find old memos (even with the search function)
c) text book stuff won't attract a considerable readership except some peers who are too lazy to read the books themselves.
Therefore for collecting thoughts, notes, webpages, PDF's, whatever, like Vikram Shenoy Handiru, I would recommend Evernote The workspace for your life’s work. IMHO it's the most versatile solution for collecting _everything_ which comes into your mind. I use it frequently for my research, travels, receipts.
If you collect stuff which might be of interest for your peers, other academics or laymen start a public blog. Daily hits and communication with the readers IMHO is huge incentive to keep on blogging. - Since you are writing 'in public' you will learn to structure your thoughts and get a deeper understanding of the stuff you are interested in.- You will improve your writing skills. - You might get in contact with people around the world.- And it's a great tool for self-marketing in your area of interest.
Anyway. Just Do It. That's the only way to find out what's working for you. Most blogs don't survive the first months, very, very few still exist after a few years. Quality content and persistence are the keys to a successful blog.
6) Arvind Devaraj, Researcher in Computer Science
--> Answered Oct 24, 2015
There is a difference in being a researcher and a blogger.
Maintaining a blog just to keep a tab on your research may not be very useful. Blogging is cumbersome, technology-based and time-consuming. I prefer applications like Evernote or OneNote to organize, categorize and retrieve all that I want from time to time.
Maybe you could try these or something similar and see if they work for you: 5 Apps To Help Students Organize What They Learn
I tried various techniques to keep track of my research work while writing my thesis. Tools like Diigo, Mendeley helped to some extent. There is still more lot of work to be done in the knowledge management space.
I got so fascinated by the possibilities in this field. Now started working on Hyperbook - a tool that helps researchers to keep track of their research content.
7) Amy Hicks, I only excel at the nearly impossible. Otherwise, I'm lazy.
--> Answered Mar 31, 2015
I track my research - even books I read aloud - through audio recordings. Or brainstorming sessions, I do it on my phone, whenever inspiration strikes or I don't want to take notes. I lock it on my server if I'm not done yet. And try to keep the following limited. (Is 4.4K plays limited?) my favorites require lots of research before they're released.
8) Nita Ostroff, A short step from needing a boss, to being one.
--> Answered Mar 21, 2015.
If you do a blog, it normally gets shared, right? So if you want it to be private, maybe a word document would be better. But if you don't mind sharing, honestly I love reading research blogs. I've seen some great ones out there.
One of the cool things about them, in my opinion, is that if yo keep having problems and nothing is "working" together, sometimes someone can read your blog and figure out where the logic problem comes in. It can be a big help.
Sometimes I read stuff and am so wowed at the person writing the blog!
9) Joe Velikovsky, PhD & Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Systems Theory Scholar
--> Answered Mar 28, 2015
I certainly think it is.
Here's my PhD research blog: StoryAlityI try and post once a week, but sometimes it doesn't happen (too busy). But I do post about conferences, and major events that I attend, etc.
It's also a great way to get feedback on your ideas, etc.
And I also have met many like-minded scholars via my blog.
I personally think: it's priceless.
10) Mark Hawkins
--> Answered Mar 24, 2015
Blogging can help you to 'keep track' in that it can aid your memory of certain stages you went through. And it acts as a neat reference point.
But more than this, the practice of personal writing in various forms serves to deeper embed and imprint memories and experience in the brain. In writing you reinforce and validate to yourself, which can strengthen a memory or learning, as well as merely leaving a record.
11) Robert J. Kolker
--> Answered Mar 25, 2015
Keeping a diary is always a good idea. If you get a bright idea or even a piece of a bright idea write it down before you forget it. Later on, when you have time you can review your bright thoughts and decide which if any to take action on.
*Personal Note: I copy and paste articles and forums like this (especially the forums) because sometimes the sources or the sites go defunct and I lose the info. It’s also time-consuming though. I’d like to find a way around that--some way to save the info that’s more efficient. I use Evernote, but it doesn’t let me link articles to my research notes. Until I find a better way, I’m going to have to keep doing this.*
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