ramblings of an aimless mind

I have just started on the long process of adding a title of “Dr.” to my name and one of the first things that struck my environmentally conscious brain is the amount of paper every PhD student/supervisor generate. There are loads of research papers, results sheets, graphs and God-knows-what that gets printed on “single” sheet paper, which after 15 minutes of usage, gets chucked straight in the bin. It makes me think that graduate students around the world would be responsible for a major chunk of the deforestation we here so much about.

“Now can I do a (nearly) paperless PhD?” was the first question that came to mind and which I decided to pursue right at the start when the actual project work is light and I have some time to spend on the extra curricular stuff. The oft-quoted reason for the reckless paper use is “so that I can highlight the important bits and make my own notes, which I cannot do on a pdf”. Come on people, in todays day and age, surely you need a better reason. A google search that took me something like 20 minutes told me about this piece of software called “PDF-XChange Viewer” which allows the user to view, highligh, add comments, draw figures and a million other things to pdf files. If you thought that was the best part, wait till you hear that its FREE!!! Those interested can check out the program at PDF X-Change Viewer

Once most of my colleagues have printed out the paper and scribbled all over it, they are then caught in the death trap of “having” to store that paper, because it not only contains published information, but also their own personal thoughts. Considering that a PhD student may spend around 3-4 years reading quite a lot of articles, I shudder to think about the state of ones desk if one tries to keep a hard copy of each and every paper they ever printed and scribbled on. So then students start using files, with coloured stickers on them to categorise information etc etc and finally landing up being “cutting edge technology researchers” who use 19th century methods for information handling.A much more elegant solution is in combining PDF-Xchange viewer with another bit of software called JabRef(again freely available at JabRef). Once a paper has been read and scribbled over with PDF-XChange Viewer, it can be saved as a softcopy and loaded into a JabRef database. Jabref has cool features that allow classification of papers into groups (such as “Must Read”, “Can ignore”, “Maybe in future”) so that searching for an article becomes something like

1. Find the proper group

2. Leftclick on the mouse.

3. rapidly read through the list till you find the titles/author/journal you are looking for. (It is also possible to sort on the basis of all these fields to help the search.)

as compared to…

1. Scan whole folders to try and remember which one can contain the paper.

2. Lift the folder and lay it on the table (try to avoid getting a hernia with the lifting)

3. Open the folder. If allergic to dust, you may want to cover your mouth and nose with a handkerchief.

4. painstakingly turn page after page till you find the paper you were looking for. By the time you find it, its probably time to go home.

I don’t think I need to enumerate the advantages of the XChange viewer + JabRef combination, they ought to be pretty obvious. So if there are any PhD students reading this, why not give it a spin? You will be making it easier for yourselves and doing the environment a favour