Fortunately, I am finally starting to find tools that work fairly well for accomplishing these tasks.īecause I use a Mac, many of these tools are Mac-centric. But either way, no more piles of paper.īut I still am left with the problem of organizing, searching, and yes, remembering to read all those PDFs….
The few I need that our library does not subscribe to I can order online through the InterLibrary Loan (ILL) program, and they arrive in my inbox as a PDF - sometimes a pixel perfect downloaded PDF, and sometimes a scanned PDF. Virtually every journal article I need now comes in PDF format. But I never would have carted those boxes around so they had to go….įortunately, something key happened between medical school and my second residency - everything moved to PDF. I was relatively inexperienced, and the reality is that my selection of articles was probably not very good, but it does sadden me that there is no way to go back and thumb through that collection. It was very freeing to get rid of the clutter. As I would be moving again, and spending an unknown amount of time in a limited amount of space, and I realized I would never go back and read all those unread articles. I tried to start a filing system, and began organizing the articles according to whatever seemed to be the central topic - a sisyphean task since most articles of interest cross boundaries into several topics.Īt that moment, however, I quit my Emergency Medicine residency. After only a year or two, this collection of articles had grown large enough to take up several large boxes. More often than not, I would tear out articles with the intention of reading them, but instead they would end up in an ever growing pile - never to be looked at again. I would tear out copies of journal articles I found interesting from the few (not so good) journals that actually came to my house. When I was in medical school, various professors and attendings would give out paper copies of journal articles that they recommended we read.