Hi All,

Recently started a PhD and I know there's no way I'd be able to keep track and manage the summaries I make of journal articles, summary of lab work, my own thoughts, research designs and plans, all in one place, in a paper format over many years. So, I have been hunting for a software that would help me do this and I stumbled across NVivo. Our University provides the software for free for PhD students and Academic Staff.

I know NVivo is excellent for managing qualitative data analysis in the Arts where they need to transcribe interviews and the like. But what about in the Life sciences? Which software is better? Does NVivo work in the Sciences too? There are no interviews to transcribe.

I wish Endote had a feature for this but the notes field in Endnote is rudimentary at best.

Many thanks.

Never heard of NVivo, but then I didn't really make notes as you are describing during my PhD. I just used Mendeley for PDFs of papers and excel for all my data.

Look at endnote, I think that may be what you are looking for. NVivo can be temperamental and it's not organised well.

I also used Mendeley to organise files and notes, and word docs too.

I do use Endnote but it is very much a reference management software. I am wanting something that allows me to make summaries of the journal articles I read, connect these summaries together, store whatever lab work and procedures I have done, make mind-maps etc. As my PhD is a part-time PhD, the project will at least take 4-5 years. So, as much as I prefer doing things on paper, it is not going to be practical to maintain everything in hard-copy format over many years.