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Hi Marco,

I have been having the same problem and came across Qiqqa ( www.qiqqa.com ). I had been using Mendeley beforehand. It is very good, and technically it should work with SciPlore. Although, it is not obvious how they both link as they are at the end of the day two separate programs. And, if you say it is not working anyway then it is not much use to you.

Qiqqa on the other hand, has a mind mapping tool built into it which organises the pdf's the way you want. Beware though, it uses an OCR reader to convert the pdf image into text so that it can provide useful tags. Mendeley just reads the meta tags on the pdf which haven't always been filled in by the author. Qiqqa's method is in principle brilliant, but in practice it uses up a huge amount of CPU memory and makes your computer run really slowly. But, if you are happy to make your own tags then it can be switched off making the program run a lot more smoothly. I am in the process of reviewing Qiqqa and will hopefully be writing a short review of it on my blog, www.indoctorate.co.uk , so feel free to have a look (once I finally get round to writing it ...).

Hope that is of some help to you.

I agree with screamingaddabs, you should first email your supervisor for an explanation incase he has a good excuse. At my place of work, everyone's file system is viewable to others. However we have the option of changing the permissions to each file i.e. readonly etc. Very often people here view other theses which are stored on the main file system to gain insight into that line of work which was perhaps missed out in the corresponding paper. Hope that helps.

I found this guide from phdcomics which I blogged, http://www.indoctorate.co.uk/2011/01/reading-scientific-papers.html, which shows how to 'Decipher Academes'. I found it quite funny:

"Results were found through direct experimentation" = "We played around with it until it works"
"These results suggest that" = "If we take a huge leap in reasoning, we can get more mileage out of our data"
"Remains an open question" = "We have no clue either"

And a few others hehe.

Thanks very much for both replies!

Yeah, basically the talk will be used by the university to try and attract people onto their courses by showing the exciting research they are carrying out. So it is assumed they are non-specialists.

I really like the idea of asking if they can see something wrong with a slide to begin with. I have a few ideas on how to include that, although like you say, it might be slightly harder to do via a recording. But I think it should still work ok as long as I don't dwell on it for too long.

I had a feeling graphics were more important, but it's nice to hear that from somebody else!

I have to have it done in the next few weeks so I will let you know how it goes.

For one of my post-graduate classes, I have to create a talk for 15-18 year olds about my PhD project and record my voice talking about each slide. Ok, so it's not quite TV :p, but I was wondering if anyone knew of any of the tricks they use for narrating documentaries. I think just recording my talk as I would normally speak it might not have the same impact.

Does anyone have any tips on how to make it a bit more exciting??

Can I hold you to that :p

I find using software is the easiest way to manage my papers. Trying to keep track of notes can become almost as hard as trying to keep track of the papers themselves. For me, the qiqqa software has a really nice way of storing pdf's (much similar to Mendeley) and it includes an integrated mind-mapping tool. The mind-mapping tool is used and linked with the pdf's. Mendeley have a similar tool called Sciplore Mindmapping. It is not integrated into Mendeley but looks easy enough to combine along side.

To do all this though, you have to have a nice big screen ;-)

Hi Matt,

I'm about 4 months into my PhD as well. I was having the exact same feelings. It also wasn't helping hearing a lot of my friends talking about how much progress they had been making. I had a similar problem to you: I had to write a code to model a certain situation. I was given a code but told that it needed upgrading. I've spent nearly 2 months trying to upgrade it only to find it is either worse or the same. So I've got to the point now where I just feel like I've wasted the last two months.

But, my supervisor told me to put it to the side and move onto the next topic. He pointed out that I may not had solved the problem I set out to do, but by trying it I learned much more than simply reading about it. And, after looking back there are a lot of things I know now that could only have come through this experience. So my advice is, don't look too much into results, but look to see what you have learned in trying to do your experiment. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the advice all :-) I don't know, I think i'm just getting a few first year nerves. My supervisor gave me a project to work on and I spent about three months trying loads of different methods. I managed to get a few of them to work, but not to a standard I thought was good enough. But my supervisor said to leave it and move to the next project. I just didn't like the thought of leaving something unfinished.

But that's made me feel better hearing what everyone has to say!

Over the last few weeks, I have been slaving over the same problem. I'm not sure whether it was the exasperation, or seeing the hours tick by that made me think about the future. It made me wonder, are people really expected to finish their PhD's with ground breaking results? Or, can we really even expect anyone to even read the final thesis? So what should be our goals after the work is done?

I got advice from a post-doctoral student which you can read here, (http://www.indoctorate.co.uk/2011/02/defining-phd_11.html), but I was really hoping to see what the general opinion is from everyone on here with regards to what you think you will get out of your PhD.

Hi guys,

I've been using Mendeley for quite a while now to take care of my references. I noticed through the threads that a few people have been using Zotero. I originally stayed away from this as it was only for firefox, but I've recently found that it is now for all platforms:
http://www.zotero.org/support/standalone

Albeit it is in its alpha test stage, but I was wondering if anyone has tried this and have any tips on how it works?

I had the exact same problem trying to think what to wear! My girlfriend advised me chino's and a shirt and jumper was a good combination to start with.

Thanks ailicec! Some of the journal abbreviations can be quite cryptic at times. I've added them to delicious bookmarks.

======= Date Modified 25 Jan 2011 11:31:36 =======
I've set up a page now on my website, http://www.indoctorate.co.uk/p/delicious-phd-bookmarks.html ,where you can find any blogs and threads about previous links. I've also added the delicious account details incase anybody loses this thread :-) and a review of Mendeley using some of the old thread links that I found on this forum.

Did I miss out any interesting links on delicious?

I've started the delicious site which you can view on www.delicious.com/phdbookmark .

The yahoo Id that I have created this with is
yahoo username: phdbookmark
yahoo password: phdlinks

To begin, I have added the links from this thread and kept the tag links very basic and straight forward. I thought it would be better to evolve these with everyones input.

I'm going to attempt to blog about any new additions at www.indoctorate.co.uk , so as cate was saying it would be good if before a link was added we could get some sort of discussion on it first.

I have been quite busy this week so haven't really had too much time to go into it in that much detail on the site, but I thought it was best to atleast keep the ball rolling ...
:-)