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The management of information

Discussion in 'Biomechanics, Sports and Foot orthoses' started by Petcu Daniel, Nov 22, 2010.

  1. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member


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    Hi,

    There is a huge and increasing amount of scientific literature related to foot and lower limb pathomechanics and foot orthoses! Only to deeply understand the concepts from the Podiatry Arena' debates necessitate a lot of time ! What about scientific articles, books, expert presentations,... behind many of these debates !!!
    How do you manage this big quantity of information ?
    How do you choose what is worth to read and what it is not important ?
    How many hours do you spend daily [or weekly] in order to be up to date with scientific information ?
    How many new articles do you read daily [or weekly]?
    Could you provide some general guidance related to the management of information as it results from your personal practice ?

    Thank you,
    Daniel
     
  2. efuller

    efuller MVP

    Cheers,
    Eric
     
  3. David Smith

    David Smith Well-Known Member

    Eric

    Download a PDF printer from 'tinternet doPDF v6 is one I use, it's only small. Scan your printed page into a folder somewhere, then select the file, choose print and from the print menu choose print to PDF. This will make a virtual print and copy to PDF and you save it in the usual way.

    Is that what you were asking?

    Dave Smith
     
  4. efuller

    efuller MVP

    That helps, but I was asking Santa for a new computer that would have enough room to store all those pdf's.

    Eric

    :santa:
     
  5. Griff

    Griff Moderator

    I use CutePDF. Similar thing - and also a free download. Also good for when forwarding letters/reports etc electronically, as you know they cant be altered if you switch them from a word file to a pdf..

    If its a subject I'm interested in I read it.

    Too many according to my Mrs. And she's probably right. If you add up time on the arena + books/journals + writing blogs etc I'd say a conservative estimate would be about 40 hours a week.

    Two a day, every day.
     
  6. I eat uranium, now my brain is so big I've got stretch marks on my cranium...
    That and a big external hard-drive.
    Everything is worthy of a speed read. I use patients and the Arena to trigger my reading. That and research projects I'm involved with. I'm an info-freako (Jesus Jones)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FjVjt78iqk there is no end to what I want to know.
    About 5 hours per day, sometimes more, sometimes less.
    Varies, somewhere between 1-10 per day.
    Kill your television http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yan77UKYcg4&feature=related
    Get a big hard drive. :dizzy:
     
  7. efuller

    efuller MVP

    Does that convert scanned images?

    Eric
     
  8. Griff

    Griff Moderator

    I have my system set up so that scanned images save as pdf files automatically Eric. What do yours save as? I'm sure it can convert any file to a pdf though: http://www.cutepdf.com/

    Ian
     
  9. AJM

    AJM Member

    Dear Daniel

    Short answer

    Look into EndNote. Buy and use something like it.

    Potentially, it will save you many hours and significantly increase the quality of your library and therefore also the professional services which you give based on it.



    The background

    If you (and others in your position) want to understand why, read on. The lengthy summary below could save you countless hours of your precious personal time.

    Like you, many years ago, I started accumulating pdfs and other media (docs, videos, audio, ppt …). My own taxonomy of folder names and doc names was brilliant, well, at least I could understand it.

    That ad hoc accumulation creates problems in the course of growing the amount of information. The more successful you are at hoarding, the more problems your success will bring when you try to use the accumulated material effectively.

    There is also a core issue of intellectual rigour (or intellectual honesty). Too often too much focus is placed on one or a few particular articles. Everyone has their own perspective and needs, but in general I find that even rigorously vetted, evidence-based original research or protocol-following review articles are limited in various ways for my needs, whether on a practical level or on the level of quality of the contents.

    In the context of burgeoning online publication, with increasing open access to the articles, the mass of available information will make the previous tendency of championing individual published articles mad, bad and dangerous. In short, my hypothesis is that the days of comfortable reliance on milestone articles have long passed and new strategies for maximising intellectual honesty and currency of professional knowledge are needed, even for practising health care practitioners.



    The solution to problems you don’t know you have

    Here is a description of the solution I adopted after experiencing the problems you might also experience, later, after building your hoard of PDFs.

    Although I describe a bigger solution to problems you do not yet have, nevertheless I am assume that ultimately you want to be able to retain and to organise copies of articles to read, apart from any other aim you have.

    It all depends on your aims and the scale of your queries. I suggest you consider how you might be placed in five to ten years. How will your efforts today help you later, when you are an internationally renowned published author, guest speaker at illustrious conferences and a regular interviewee on popular cable TV shows or webinars. Or, you just might like to have the best research data base in your interest areas to ensure your humble advice to each of your client is soundly based, filtered on principles of evidence-based research and practical heath care supported by years of experience of those who have trodden the same path before you, supplemented by challenging ideas from tyros challenging the old paradigms.

    Or some-one will post to podiatry-arena their list of references on a topic of interest to you and, being independently minded, you do not want to fall victim to their biases.



    Bibliographic manager

    I now use EndNote. This is a software application for managing bibliographic references. There are competing applications. They have different features, advantages and disadvantages. They have different versions, according to the level of sophistication which you want. Before you buy, trial them in your work and IT environment. I use mine in a cloud environment, which means I can access it anywhere with internet connections and don’t have to worry about back ups, memory size or continuity of interaction with other applications (especially Word etc). I therefore do not need portable libraries or web-versions of EndNote.

    Basically, for a few hundred dollars, more or less, I have saved hundreds of hours of my time, if not thousands of hours, achieving faster and sooner a more comprehensive library of items relevant to my interests, with more depth and intellectual rigour, compared with the outcome of my earlier efforts from slowly accumulating PDFs stored in my own folder system, brilliant though it was.

    Even if you do not expect to use EndNote as rigorously as an academic, student or publishing author would (for writing papers), it has many benefits for those who do not write papers for publishing or lecturing but have different aims, even as humble as storing PDFs.

    (By the way, I have no interests to disclose. I am a user who paid in full for my EndNote – no student or academic free licence, thank you.)



    Citations

    The items are stored with their bibliographic references that are (mostly!) correct and instantly adaptable to whatever publishing format is appropriate (according to hundreds of journal standards or tailored to your own peculiar format).

    Once entered in EndNote, there is no need ever to spend any more time getting the bibliographic data correct. This ensures you have one record, done once, which is the bedrock for later searches, comparisons, citations and publications (even your humble lecture ppts to the local bunion fanciers society will have correct reference citations, not amateurish garbled references casting doubt on your professionalism).

    By instantly adopting the correct bibliographic reference without any manual entering of data, you are tapping into the entire universe of scientific or health care references. If some-one cites to you Article X by Y, you can see if they have cited it correctly and instantly search for other articles that have cited that Article X or whether there are any letters published angrily denouncing Article X. If you like Article X, you can have strategies for ensuring you are alerted if it is ever citied, corrected or converted from ePublish ahead of print to final form. You can follow up articles by Y (you can do that with online searches, but not comprehensively nor (generalising for this post) in most cases can you retain online that information in a unusable format.)

    Basically, EndNote or another reference manager helps you live in the same universe as most other users of the same citation (more or less – await Lecture 201 on errors and idiosyncrasies of bibliog. references).

    In contrast, too many times I have seen ad hoc file names incorrectly labelled and exchanged and that slows down the research and exchange of information and ideas.

    Also, it is interesting how different articles share similar or exact titles, or the same author will generate across different publications some very similar articles with only slightly different titles and corresponding subject parameters (I make no aspersions about this apparent desperate tactic for increasing citations of their publications). The more you collect, the more you need to be precise and universal about your data naming conventions. EndNote takes the trouble out of that and makes easier the processes of searching, exchanging, co-ordinating multi-disciplinary health care management (e.g., ensuring each doctor, physio, podiatrist, chiro etc have access to the same body of information, not constrained by their own professional perspectives), collaborating and publication.

    Inherent in this is a bias towards managing citations, not a focus on attached PDFs for their own sake.



    Obtaining references

    The bibliographic references are generally automatically downloaded from searching either from within EndNote or at the source (say, a website for the journal or for an aggregator of journals). Most of this is near instantaneous, thus saving hours of time. This was one of the biggest practical changes pre- and post-EndNote.

    The practical change leads to a strategic change.

    Imagine you have accumulated 500 or even 9,000 items of various kinds in your own bespoke database (that is, before using a reference manager). Each new item gets laboriously added to your library. That might take a few years to accumulate, depending on your free time or the number of assistants you have (he he). Some-one sends you an old article about dorsiflexion of the frblisxia. You are not sure if that is correctly labelled or if you already have the article, or if there is a more recent article which denounced it as spuriously based on a limited cohort of Texan vegetarians. You spend hours trying to make sure you have got on top of that one potential piece of the puzzle.



    In contrast, EndNote allows instant searching in both your existing database and into PubMed, Medline, Library of Congress and a zillion other sources, using your search parameters, according to sources, key words, authors, subscriptions you have etc. Your searches from within EndNote are more reliable than Google Scholar and instantly add the search results into your existing library or you can selectively delete them from your search before acceptance into your library. Duplicate entries arising from your searches are automatically discarded, so you do not inadvertently store duplicates. Or, less reliably, do your Google scholar search or other wide search (and, say, limit it to those with available PDFs and import citations into EndNote).

    If later you have a new topic to research, you can add, in seconds, I would guess about 90%+ of the better quality bibliographic references on your topic (depending on your needs and criteria) and then you can choose to follow up the new items added to your database.

    It is a strategic change from individual accumulation, item by item, to an approach of capturing most of the available published references and then filtering down, according to your own screens (of quality, journals, age of article, language, key words etc). I moved some years ago from aiming for quality of each item added to my library towards a strategy of quality of all searches, then screening after that on a needs basis. It makes a huge difference in the speed and depth of research. Instead of triumphantly holding aloft one precious article, for my needs I instead focus on trying to cover the field of reasonably available, quality items and then filtering down according to protocols I developed for my own criteria.

    Partly what drives this is the poor quality of published original research, or the impractical utility of a lot of it (according to my needs). Even after choosing to filter for compliance with quality evidence based research, the practical utility of much of what is left is negligible (according to my needs, which of course differs from the needs of others).

    Having access to a considerable depth of references minimises my exposure to the biases of others and to their own limited research capacity.

    For example, many of the responses in this forum give curiously limited and selective bibliographic reference lists, despite their sincere generosity. Perhaps that unavoidably reflects individual biases and needs. Time and time again a selective bilbiog. list on this forum generates many a cheap chortle at the biases in the proffered list.

    On the other hand, a list generated in a second from my EndNote database on the same topic has its own limitations – it might give thousands, hundreds, or just a dozen, items - depending on what filters I put in. It takes time and effort to agree what is relevant for the recipient. It would be unhelpful if I sent a list of my references involving “orthoses” or “orthotics” – currently well over 2000 (about 4% of the database), and that excludes a lot on some fields I have no interest in, such as dealing with stroke victims or “soccer”/”football” players. You might well accumulate 500 or 3000 on that topic, depending on your criteria.

    If I sent you a PDF of the fully formatted list of references in my database with those words in them or an EndNote export library of those references (which includes PDFs and everything needed to import into your own reference manager), that would still have my bias but you could at least build from that by continuing to add the results of your own searches.

    (The exchange of reference manager libraries has challenged some in academia, particularly those who are proprietary about their efforts of research. It used to be that references were accumulated on cards, often with the help of enslaved research assistants, in monk like secrecy. Part of the raison d’être for tenured academics is lost if there is a free and quick electronic exchange of bibliographic references, but full collaboration has been embraced by many for some time. In contrast, I have found ready acceptance among many HCPs who are very willing to exchange references libraries because it helps them save hours, it improves their knowledge base and improves their patient care, in contrast with relying on their professional bodies which are usually well behind times, highly selective and tend to gravitate towards the lowest consensus. )



    [As a half baked idea, podiatry-arena could have an area devoted to individual reference manager libraries of selected search terms, regularly updated by a sponsor of that particular library. For example, there could be posted to a thread an export file of, say, the items from searching only “plantar fasciitis”. Any person could download that file from time to time. There is no copyright issue (journals encourage this, since it encourages awareness of their jounarl and potenrially increases the citations of their articles).

    If for example the visitor to that thread has EndNote too, then downloading the import file will only add to their library anything that is not a duplicate of what they already have. (I understand that there is some exchangeability as among EndNote and other reference managers, but I do not know the details.)

    The sponsor of that search term could update the library import file as an when they see fit. Those who have subscribed to that thread will be automatically notified when it is updated. The use of such files save time, memory space, retains accuracy, avoids repetition, is scalable and is far more useable by more people than a manually written list in Word of bibliog. entries.

    Another thread in this area of podiatry-arena could have a sponsored EndNote library for a more limited search parameter, say, “plantar fasciitis” and “athlete/runn*” or, say, “plantar fasciitis” and “youth/young/adolescent/junior/child/children”. The possibilities for sponsored search terms are endless.

    Depending on satisfying copyright issues, the library as posted could also accumulate attached PDFs, e.g., only PDFs of open access items.)]



    Depending on what you aim to do, you can slowly and systematically accumulate items in EndNote in your interest areas. Then you only need to top them up with newly published items in those areas. You will find that you spend far less time on accumulating the core of what you need and more time is spent only on accumulating the more recently published items in that area of interest or in expanding your library database with items which are of new interest to you.



    Too much for a practising podiatrist? Nay. It is the essence of a professional to keep up to date and to be expert in some fields. It is good professional and business practice. In my case, I am in a position to influence many people away from doctors, podiatrists and other health care practitioners who are generalists and show no interest in keeping their knowledge current or no interest in having a deeper, theoretical and practical basis for their services than they had when they left uni. I have no financial interest in this – only an interest in ensuring patient care is to an appropriate standard. The better HCPs are rewarded with a stream of referred patients and they see those patients more often (for screening and for systematic care management, not just post-trauma injuries). Besides, it will help you keep ahead of the dreaded patient who is an expert from their Google searches.



    “Items?”

    By “ bibliographic items” I mean just about anything you can think of.

    I generally focus on storing in EndNote published journal articles from reputable sources, theses, abstracts, congress proceedings, selected poster presentations, seminar presentations, quality lecture notes, key books, chapters in books, videos, audio files and some riff raff (selected popular magazine articles, newspaper articles, some web pages, transcripts of radio or webinars, professional body position statements …).

    Everything is classifiable and sortable with ease. This solves an issue that you would face if you first only think of storing PDFs.

    In time, you will want to store videos, or podcasts, or PPTs or spreadsheets.

    In theory, you could use EndNote for storing patient videos or treatment (to supplement a patient database management system). So, e.g., you could file in EndNote videos of clients on the treadmill (not that I agree with the utility of that, but that’s another diatribe) and enter key words of your choice in each entry that you create (e.g., male v female, junior netball player, gobsmacking pronation, humorously shaped verruca …). Over time, you can do a search of your own EndNote files and realize that you have enough data on 14 year old androgynous tennis players to write a paper.

    The point is that a reference manager will help you grow from a PDF-focus to adopt a strategy of organising whatever media you wish.



    Searching

    Searching is a key feature for me and perhaps it is what first drove me away from the ad hoc virtual mountain of PDF and other items.

    The problem with accumulating your own hoard of folders, sub-folders and files is the very limited and unintelligent search capacity of that approach. Scans of PDFs do not always allow searching of the content. It is hard to do quick searches by, say, date, author, journal or key words. What if there are eight authors – do you individually enter each one in your own system, in case the PDF file itself does not allow internal searches? What if you read an article and want to store your notes about it (“outrageous financial interest of authors”; “uses discredited theories abandoned by RoW in 1960s”, “insufficient subject history”, “relevant only for 35 year old female recreational runners who train on roads” …). How can you store and search your own research comments so that you do not have to re-read each article to remember your thoughts at the time?

    In a reference manager, all of that is retained and searchable, even if the attached item itself is not in searchable form.

    I guess the point for you is that early on you tend to focus on accumulation. Later you might move towards depth, accuracy, relevancy, quality, kind of article, comprehensiveness of references relevant to your interests, curiosity of the peripheral or ancillary issues and then you need the capacity to filter all of that (according to evidence, journal, time, author, term …). In short, now you might not realise what searching capability you will need later.

    For example, to take a recent theme of investigation, if you were to start researching quality published articles on tarsal navicular stress fractures, it could take some time. Since you have a business to run (or a huge public hospital case load), but you have high professional standards of care, do you spend hours at night (away from podiatry-arena) searching the web, sending pestering emails, or going to your local major library (which probably does not hardcopies of or online access to have the excellent European journals you need to search? Not all journals on line are instantly searchable. Googling scholar throws up a lot of rubbish and the more you look into the top layers of googly-available material, the more you see poor quality publications recycled uncritically, especially without attribution on semi-professional websites. Cochrane reviews or Pedro can have severe limitations, depending on your needs and standards.

    As a professional, you cannot work with that dross. Merely to rely on recycled, uncritical regurgitation of non-analysed publications dooms you to a low standard of care for your patients. You might as well become an anonymous dispenser of online health advice (take two off the shelf orthoses and see me in six months’ time if pain persists).

    On the other hand, to do the job properly, you need to master the change in the research terms for navicular stress fractures over the years. You need several different ways of approaching it, in order to get to reliable, quality research and to understand the biases in publications in different eras.

    Your patient is a middle aged office worker prone to only week-end physical exertion from paintball (or ws it rugby?). USA publications can tend to dominate in quantity, but not necessarily in quality or relevancy to your practical issues with your real live patient who can only come in to see you again in two days’ time. How much should you rely on case histories by USA surgeons who have a tendency to screw down anything they can’t cut out and report their findings of case histories heavily biased towards college basketball players who trained six hours a day for ten months? What about that Finnish report on injury reports among sub-elite cross country skiers in out of season training? Didn’t some-one post to a thread on this in podiatry-arena – is that enough to rely on? (Hint compare the number of articles posted to podiatry-arena with the available several hundred journal articles on the topic.)

    It’s your choice and the clock is ticking: Do you rely on one or two articles from podiatry-arena sent by others? Do you desperately rely on 560,000 search results from Google Scholar? Do you rely on your own systematically accumulated, updatable, searchable database which you have filtered over time?



    In the course of getting your search results, you are going to uncover a lot of items on metatarsal injuries, stress fractures (once called "fatigue fractures", suggesting you can get them from housework), bone healing, lower limb injuries, rehab, imaging (from early days of X-ray failures of detection through to CT scans to MRIs and beyond). How do you not waste all that for when, sometime in the future, you need half of the same material for dealing with metatarsal stress fractures? What if your next patient has come to you after being diagnosed two months ago with both a navicular stress fracture and evidence of metatarsal stress? Woops, did you reject all of those search results when you were focussing on navicular stress fractures because then you did not have the time to deal with anything not strictly related to that?

    So, how do you organise all of the incidental but potentially relevant material uncovered in your search? If you have stored them in EndNote you are accumulating everything as you go, in an instantly searchable format, with limits as you decide. You can ignore what you do not need for now, but you have it for the future. So, strategically, each avenue you later travel down for a real, practical need actually helps your future research on topics you have not yet needed to address.



    When a young ballet dancer later comes to you presenting a midfoot problem, you have probably already amassed 80% to 90% of the references you need to start looking into the issues at a level appropriate to the standard of care you wish to give. Of course, if you only want to treat on the basis of your undergraduate studies and maybe a bootcamp seminar or two since then, that is your personal choice. Give me your full business address so I and thousands of others can avoid you. Alternatively, give a high level of soundly-based care, and you increase the prospect of attracting a steady succession of ballet dancers as new clients.



    Attaching PDFs and other items

    The PDF of the articles are either automatically attached during the search process, or the PDF is located by other means and I attach it later. (Sometimes too many PDFs come your way too soon and you can only later have the time to add them to EndNote, or later check if you already have them.)

    Whether the PDF or other material is automatically attached during your searches or is manually attached, the storage of them is automatic in EndNote– it gets filed in some way you never have to look at. You access the PDF or other material by accessing the bibliographic citation entry. It means you no longer have to build the folder system – you rely on EndNote’s multipoint access. (Actually, you can still search the old way, but there is absolutely no need to look under the hood of EndNote’s data files.)

    There’s another chapter of this topic just on obtaining PDFs. Each to his or her own environment – in my case obtaining each attachment must comply with the copyright of the publisher and author. It is easier to exchange bibliographic references very generally, then later exchange the PDF in an environment when you can be sure that copyright is respected.

    The point potentially relevant to you is that you too might later follow the same path of moving from the perspective of focusing on first getting hold of the PDF to a strategy of finding out comprehensively what is available then filtering that, then finding the attachments that are needed. EndNote and other bibliographic reference managers make the second approach very easy and fast. Even if you do not have the free access to PDFs that a student or an academic might have, there are many proper ways of accessing PDFs of items that are relevant to your interest.

    If the PDF is not immediately available, one or more URLs of the citation are almost always available from the search and automatically loaded into your saved entry (with a few exceptions – pay attention in Lecture 201). If for example my searches reveal an article whose abstract triggers my interest but the article is not attached, then in a trice I have clicked on the automatically downloaded url link and I am at the website of the citation, which could be directly at the article (whose subscription access I might have or it might be open access), or at an aggregator or at the citation at Pubmed which has its own leads from there.

    For sale

    One brilliant taxonomy for managing folders of PDFs, no longer used.
     
  10. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member

    I've had a very good teacher at the university who tried to explain me that, from his point of view, the management of information means that every professionals should develop a taxonomy of concepts related to an objective, able to generate a continuous and logical "red line" between concepts from different levels. Organizing the concepts as an informational tree [where there are categories for the concepts with the same level - for example "foot paradigms"- and sub-categories when we want to go deep into a category -for example "STJ Neutral", "Tissue Stress", "SALRE",...] it is something analogue with building a puzzle. The essence of this puzzle is that when it is very well developed it will give you information about missing pieces and also new strategies for development ! One secondary results could be that it permits to you to retain, organize and search for the copies of articles. I also have tried to create my own taxonomy of folder names - but it is not a taxonomy of concepts [even if I've tried to put a concept as a folder name] !
    The questions are :
    -how could be developed a taxonomy of concepts related to "biomechanics, pathomechanics, sport and foot orthoses" for example,
    -how EndNote or a similar product could help to build this taxonomy ?

    Thank you ,
    Daniel
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2010
  11. AJM

    AJM Member

    My epiphany was that taxonomies matter far less when you have immense searchability.

    The taxonomies were changing too much - too many sub issues, too many changes of names of levels and, most critically, too often multiple important aspects to the one article.

    An analogy would be with the limitations with using the Dewey decimal system for library books and continually trying to classify one particualr book into smaller and smaller classification divisions, when the same book ought to be on many shelves at once. Why bother with any dewey number if you can search everywhere at once and instantly retrieve what you need?

    The wise words of your mentor need to be updated for the digital age.

    However, EndNote will help you manage your own taxonomy.
    In EndNote you create a "Group". Call it "Fruit". If you had no other subdivision, you add to it the selected entries to that Group. It does not copy or change anything in EndNote - it just means that you can go to that Group to see all of the entries which you have allocated to it.

    Under the Group, you create sub groups of your choice: "Fruit by colours" "Fruit Injuries" and "Fruit philosophies".
    Under "Fruit by colours" you create sub-sub groups: "Fruit - red"; "Fruit - yellow" and so on.
    An article you have on bruising to bananas could be allocated to both "Fruit - yellow" and to "Fruit Injuries". After allocation to both sub-sub-groups, it remains the same entry - it is not duplicated - it is just allocated to different sub-sub-groups. If you did a search of all of your entries in your EndNote library for the terms "fruit" + "yellow", you would allocate all or some of the search results to the sub-sub-group "Fruit - yellow".
    Months later, when you have a particular interest in yellow fruit, you
    notice that one of the entries in "Fruit - yellow" is actually about raspberries and somehow it get there by accident. You delete it from that group but that does not delete it from the database - it's still there (just not in a group).

    Making groups and sub-groups is easy, quick and near limitless. This allows you to create, change and rename your taxonomy.

    I change my sub-groups frequently but it does not mean much. I create new sub-groups just to help see the combined search results of areas of current interest. E.g., you don't need a taxonomy that covers some conceptual organisation down to the level of verruca treatments. When you are particularly interested in that, you could create a sub-group, then add to it the results from your existing entries and the results from searching from EndNote or downloads of citations directly from the source. Later, when the topic bores you and it clutters your taxonomy - delete the sub-group. No entries are affected and the sub-group can be created again very quickly.

    The groups can be "smart groups" which make it easy to search on terms you have decided.

    In EndNote you can expand or collapse the levels whenever, so your visual image is not cluttered by all the layers you create in the group hierachy.
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2010
  12. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member

    Because at this moment I have no enough time to see how EndNote works, I have need some clarifications :
    -First situation :
    1. how an item will be registered in the system, independent of my taxonomy ?

    - Second situation :
    Let say :
    - I've developed my own "momentariness" taxonomy related to a target and according to the level of my knowledge at the moment,
    - this taxonomy will provide me the name of groups or sub-groups which generate keywords for registering or searching for registered items [articles, images, ...]
    - I'll register an item in the system according to my actual keywords,
    - I discover on Podiatry Arena a new concept, let say "zones of optimal leg stiffness" which generate the keyword "zools". From debates I suppose that some of my previous registered items has a link/connection with this new concept. But them wasn't registered in the system using keywords "zools" because I didn't know the concept at the registering moment.
    The question is :
    2. how the system will help me to find previous registered items associated with "zools" ?

    Thank you,
    Daniel
     
  13. efuller

    efuller MVP

    Is the database you want for your own personal use or for someone else to use. There will be a big difference when searching if you have read the article before or not. If you have read the article before and are looking for it because you want a specific piece of data or quote then you will know a fair number of characteristics about the article. In this case the question might be where is my copy of this article.

    If this database is for multiple people you might as well use PubMed. There are a huge number of ways to search for things there. Playing with how to limit searches will have a learning curve, but it is powerful. Giving each article you have a few keywords might be a way to search for it again.

    What do you want to use the database for.

    Eric
     
  14. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member

    If I consider a medium number of 3 articles studied per day it will result in 200 days a number of 600 articles [ "frogs" and "princess"]- let say per year - which means a personal database. It will be a need for some of them to be studied again in the future ! How I'll proceed ? I think I have to organize a little how I store the information ! Not only for having the easiest way to find some registered articles , but also to see if I have some information related to a new concept discussed, for example, on Podiatry Arena.

    Let's take an example:
    "The windlass mechanism of the foot. A mechanical model to explain pathology". [a "princess" ;), I'm sure not only in my opinion !]
    - In PubMed it is associated with next MeSH Terms :
    1.Biomechanics
    2.Fasciitis/physiopathology
    3.Foot/physiology
    4.Hallux
    5.Limitus/physiopathology
    6.Hallux Valgus/physiopathology
    7.Humans
    8.Models, Structural
    9.Range of Motion, Articular

    Are these terms enough "sensitive" and "specialized" ?
    The question is : How I'll classify it in my own database ?
    I think this article it is suitable for the next 4 main categories [each one with its sub-categories ] :
    1. Author- 1.1 EF

    2. Foot paradigms – 1.2 Tissue Stress

    3. Biomechanics – 3.1 Mechanisms – 3.1.1 Windlass
    3. Biomechanics – 3.2 Models – 3.2.1 Free body diagrams

    4. Pathomechanics – 4.1 Plantar Fasciitis
    4. Pathomechanics – 4.2 Hallux Abducto Valgus
    4. Pathomechanics – 4.3 Hallux Limitus

    What is important is that with this article it was created a new direction "free body diagrams" which I don't understand very well now but it may be helpful in the future !

    There are some questions :

    - how good is this taxonomy ?
    - which are in this taxonomy the place for other new concepts like for ex. "zools" ?
    - how can it be easily managed ? Using folders [category] and sub-folders [sub-category] will work well only for a time ! Maybe EndNote could be a solution - which I suppose doesn't solve the most important problem which in my opinion is to create a constructive taxonomy !

    I could kill my television but I'm sure I don't like uranium !
    So, how do you classify your information ?

    Thank you all for your answers !
    Daniel
     
  15. Griff

    Griff Moderator

    Daniel,

    As this thread has progressed I have become more and more confused as to what exactly has been being discussed. Are you asking the best way to store pdfs on your computer so that you can find them again easily??

    If so, all the above sounds unecessarily complicated to me. I have a folder on my computer titled 'Journal articles'. In it are well over 1000 pdfs. If you asked me to find the articles which rubbished the wet foot test I could find them almost immediately. Likewise if I needed an article on the windlass mechanism, or on leg stiffness. Or any other topic for that matter - you get the idea. I think you are looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist... unless I'm missing your point?
     
  16. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member

    It is Ok if you could find the information according to your searches in your 'Journal Articles' folder!
    I, personally, I'm not satisfied with my way to store articles and also with my searches because, for ex. it gives me too many general items or sometimes, important articles are not discovered because in some kind of pdf files it is not possible to search inside the text ! Or, I'm limited to search only based on the words from the article. How do you attach your keywords to an article stored in a folder ?
    So, I'm thinking that a system of management of information [articles, presentations, books,....] could help me, not only for finding stored articles, but also to better understand many concepts related to development of biomechanics and foot orthoses. I've found this idea in Hans Selye's book - "From dream to discovery", where he has written [approximate translation from Romanian]: "Understanding, represent the process of establishing connections between the recognized units of the nature.... To understand, we firstly have to recognize the classification units [of any field, discipline -my note] ... Only such a process of formation and classification of units can bring order in our thoughts ... to explore the structural and causal relationships between units "
    From this thread I've seen the reference management software solutions [like EndNote] offer a lot of possibilities to classify information according to general standards and also from your point of view, using your keywords. I also have seen on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software there are a lot of such kind of solutions which I didn't know before ! It will be interesting for me to see if someone from PA members use these kind of software solution [I have seen the EndNote is used but now I would like to know some opinions about the free one, like for ex. Zotero ]
    I hope to succeed a little to clarify my problem. Hans Selye's book explain very clear this !

    Daniel
     
  17. efuller

    efuller MVP

    It seems that you want to read so many articles that you won't be able to remember what each one is about. Then you will want to retrieve an article on a specific topic at a later point in time. You also want to be able search them for information that you did not pick up the first time. The latter is a hard one, because you are the one who is assigning the keywords.

    When I was writing my Chapter for Valmassey's text I was reading multiple articles in a day and had a hard time remembering which article had which bit of information. What I did was after I read the article I made a short note of the data/factoid that I wanted to include in the finished chapter. I put that information in a text document that I could search. I was also trying a spreadsheet, but wasn't satisfied with how it came out. Then I organized the factoids by sections of the chapter and then patched them together to write the chapter.

    So, the more important papers I had to read several times to make sure that I got the facts right and that way I was better able to remember what facts came from a particular paper. The task was made easier by the fact that I new what information I wanted out of the paper. Above, it seems like part of your goal is to catalog information that you didn't get out of the paper. That is a lot harder.

    You could just save the .pdf's and then do the PubMed search and look at the articles you want to look up and then see if you already have them.

    Eric
     
  18. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member

    This is an old thread but I thought that someone will find useful a software which is analysing article's citations. I, personally, found interesting to see, for example, which is the most cited article of an author or which other articles is citing an interesting one! One which can be used for this purpose is: Publish or Perish, https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish
    Daniel
     
  19. footplant

    footplant Active Member

    Hi Daniel,

    I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I've started using Mendeley software. Someone above mentioned Endnote. I haven't used endnote but I believe Mendeley is similar but free. There's a web browser plug in which allows you to click 'save' when you're on the journal webpage, and then the software saves the citation/abstract/link and PDF document if it's available. You can also add unpublished work to your library, or save PDFs from your existing collection. The web plug in syncs to a program on your desktop. You then build a library that you can search, categorise etc. I've taken a screenshot of my (small) library so far. The program lets you build a reference list using your library when you write an article. If you've not come across it it may be worth a look: https://www.mendeley.com

    Josh
     

    Attached Files:

  20. Petcu Daniel

    Petcu Daniel Well-Known Member

    Hi Josh,
    I'm using Zotero and looking at Mendeley screenshot you've attached I'm supposing that you can't know from it (like me with Zotero) how many times each article of an author is cited (for example "Aneetha Skinner") or which is the most cited article of an author or what other articles is citing one of its articles (for example "The use of standardized outcome measures in rehabilitation centres in the UK"). AM I right? I think Endnote has options to find the answer but as far as I know just for ISI articles. Under "Publish or Perish" you can also find the answers as you can see from the attached screenshots
    Daniel
     

    Attached Files:

  21. ildar_84

    ildar_84 Welcome New Poster

    Hi Petcu Daniel
    To make a structure and manage information in world of "feet biomechanics" I use a Evernote Premium (close to 80 per year). It can work like a "second brain-your own digital database" and can store effectivelly all information what you meet in web (can copy whole web page for example-PubMed and save a link to it, can copy whole pdf and save a link, find any word in these articles, pages, pdfs, videos and even in all pictures in your evernote ) and in real world. Of course you can make your tags and filter information using them. I can`t add image (no messages yet)
     
  22. ildar_84

    ildar_84 Welcome New Poster

    Also inside a pdf you can make your own tags and notes which "stick" inside pdf and stay there like additional information which help recoznise important (influental, significant ) parts of article.
     
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