I’ve been slowly working on my MSc research proposal. Still **far** to early to post any of it online, but it’s starting to take shape. I’m using [Papers](http://mekentosj.com/papers/) to gather journal articles for reference as I’m working. Today, I added 33 articles to the stack, on top of the 63 I’ve already gathered. That’s not manageable. But Papers has some great tools to help cut through stuff quickly. I can sort the articles by the number of citations they have, which pushes “important” articles up to the top of the list. Then I can work through them all more effectively, without worrying about missing anything important.
Of course, Papers is also to blame for the tall stack of papers to read. It makes it almost **too easy** to find articles.
A giant list of 96 papers with 33 new additions becomes a filtered list of 31 papers to read first, sorted by “importance”. Now, if I had an iPad to read the papers without being tethered to a computer (or killing a forest of trees, and draining several unicorns of their blood for inkjet printer cartridges…)
