Hi guys I just wanted to know what your strategy was for reading papers. I've been reading so many papers since starting my PhD but im starting think that im going to start to forget what i've read because i'm reaidng so much. What strategy do you use? do you make notes?

My advice, write your literature review as you are reading. By doing this, you will have the nice feeling of actually seeing tangible results and not run the risk of forgetting everything/having to make notes/and so on. Also, even if it's not a perfect chapter, you will have some drafts to show to your supervisor. It will save you loads of time and efforts in your writing up stage (assuming you are humanities/social sciences).

Yeah thats a good idea Otto.. One thing I do is make little notes on each paper i read in EndNOte that way I can search for my own keywords/phrases for when i am looking for papers

For every paper I read, I make a Word document which I name with the author's surname, then I group the papers in topics. I tend to write down only the aspects of the paper which might be useful for my research, which confirm my hypothesis or which challenge them, rather than offering a complete overview of the paper.

This is very personal I suppose but I started out doing the following, and am very glad I did.

-Give each paper a reference ie First authors name and year published ie Rutherford:07
-After reading the paper write the 3 main points at the top, it is good to summarise straight after you read it and will help you when you come back months later.
-Put all your references into BibTex/Endnote using the same reference as above so you can search them easily.