Ilya Shabanov Profile picture
Jan 9, 2023 β€’ 20 tweets β€’ 7 min read β€’ Read on X
What is the simplest organisation tool for academics?

β–Ί Trello

Use boards to organise research, lab inventory or job applications.
Alone or as a team. It's free.

A beginner step-by-step guide πŸ‘‡
#ScienceTwitter #AcademicTwitter Image
In Trello you arrange cards in lists (columns) by drag and drop.

The context defines a card/list.

Todo list: Card = Task, List = todo, blocked or done
Lab inventory: Card = Item, List = stocked, running low, depleted

Share boards with others as well.

Let's dig in! Image
Go to Trello . com and make a free account.

Click on the big blue button, top right.

You can use basic features, free forever. Image
Enter your email address.

You will have to confirm it within 14 days. Image
Choose a name for your project and possible collaborators

This is not important for now. You can change all of it later.

Adding and removing collaborators is easy afterwards too. Image
At the prompt to go Premium, click "Skip".

Trello's core features are free. Which will be enough for 90% of use cases.

So don't worry about payment. Image
You should now be in your workspace overview.

Trello is organised in "Boards".

A Board is simply a collection of To-Dos that are related.
Have as many as you like.

Click the button to create a first board. Image
You will be prompted to name your board.

Additionally you can select a background - just for looks.

Everything can be changed later on too. Image
This is your first "board". (I changed the background, so it is more easier visible)

Let's create a few tasks here. Image
The board is organized in columns or lists.

You start your tasks out on the LEFT in "To Do"
They "step" to the RIGHT to "Done" Image
Everything is drag and drop.

Here i have added 2 new columns: "Today" and "Blocked"
(button on the top right)

And moved some tasks to "Today"
As it is morning and I am planning what to do next. Image
If you click on any task, you can see some details.

Description : One per Task.

Comments: Many per Task. We will see how to use this in a few steps. Image
You can attach images and data to each card.

Often this will be a screenshot,
a document (like a paper)

The top image becomes a cover image. Image
Cover images are very useful to quickly distinguish tasks
in the board. Image
Now let's invite a colleague to one of our tasks.

They will see the board exactly as you see it. So every change they make you will see as well.

You will also get notified when changes are made. Image
You have now assigned the colleague "Charly" to the task.

They will get notifications when the card is moved or edited.

Assign cards to yourself and others only if you need to be notified about the progress.

Upload papers or any related data directly onto the card. Image
Invite colleagues directly to the whole board.

It makes it very simple to collaborate and communicate on one project.

Only members of one card get notified about changes.

This saves you from dozens of emails that do not concern you. Image
Trello is just one visual planning tool I use.

Here is another one you might enjoy!

Summary

β–Ί Create boards with tasks, applicants, lab items (top to down).
β–Ί Move these through a lifecycle (left to right).
β–Ί Comment on cards to talk to colleagues
β–Ί Keep an overview of the whole process / inventory / project.

I used it for a decade and still love it!
If you found this thread helpful, please retweet the first tweet in this thread.

To become an expert on academic organisation, join my πŸ“© newsletter.
Link in profile.

Ask me in the comments how to use Trello for your challenge.
I value and answer all comments.

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More from @Artifexx

Apr 27
Plagiarism is a serious problem in academia.

Even a misplaced citation can massively damage your reputation.

Luckily AI is great at spotting plagiarism. Here is how:
πŸ‘‡ Image
1. Plagiarism is complex

If you look at the Harvard Guide it identifies 6 types of plagiarism.

"Uncited paraphrase" might be the most difficult to spot.

Here you might mention established findings from older papers without citing them. Image
2. Check for Plagiarism

After you have written your manuscript (yourself!). You might still end up with a few unintended instances of plagiarism.

This is where @teampaperpal comes in.

Make an account on paperpal . com and click "Plagiarism Check" in the sidebar. Image
Read 7 tweets
Apr 2
Don't have time to read a paper in detail?

Here is how to extract relevant information instantly:
πŸ‘‡ Image
The setup:

You have a rather large and relevant conceptual paper.

There are others and you are not sure if it's worth reading it.

You are however more interested in the "big picture" not the methods and details.
1. Upload the PDF to MyAIDrive(dot)com

Copy the link to the PDF.

MyAiDrive will analyze the PDF and make the results available in ChatGPT. Image
Read 8 tweets
Mar 26
Want to remember every paper you read?

Replace Zotero with a reference map and leverage your spatial memory.

Here is how:
πŸ‘‡

1. Reference manager vs map

Take a look at this screenshot: Which one looks more approachable and interesting? On the right is Zotero displaying all your papers in an endless list. On the left is a reference map.

Reference maps lay out your papers or PDFs in 2D on an endless surface called a "canvas" or "whiteboard". There are many tools that are capable of doing it: Obsidian is an obvious choice, Heptabase is great too, DrawIO is more complex but also good.

2. Zooming in and out / Finding things

Using the scroll wheel or pinch gesture you can fluidly navigate between the bird's eye view and the detailed view with your own notes on a single paper. Left: Detail, Right: All Papers.

To find papers you "fly up" and then "land on" the paper you are looking for. It feels incredibly natural and easier than scrolling through a list.

3. Why it works: Spatial Memory
Humans evolved moving around as hunter gatherers and spatial memory is a key trait needed for navigation. You leverage it by laying out your papers in a landscape, not a list. Your papers gain location and relation.

4. Headers and Topics: Location
Now that your papers are on a landscape or map you can have "countries" on this map. Every country is a topic, further subdivided in sub-topics. Here is the "Machine Learning Country" in the far south west of my map:

I can refer to "papers in the south west" - this is spatial memory being leveraged to remember where things are.

5. Semantic Connections: Relation

The next step is to build the "roads" between locations on the map. Simply draw an arrow and write on it what this relation signifies.

In the above example Swenson 2020 (top) wrote "the trait-demography relationship is weak (Yang 2018)".
So I read Yang 2018 (left) and added a connection. Later I found that (Lynn 2023) suggested a few solutions and linked those two as well.

By just looking at this map you can immediately write a sentence for your literature review. A narrative emerges and synthesis begins.

Summary:

Lay out papers on a spatial canvas using e.g. Obsidian instead of Zotero. Remembering them will be much easier because you can use your spatial memory. Synthesis starts happening automatically when you annotate connections between papers.

Do you do something like this?
Share a screenshot with us!Image
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This is one of the methods you can learn about in my upcoming webinar:

In this post I mentioned Heptabase and Obsidian as tools to achieve this results.

Here is a comparison between those two:

effortlessacademic.com/note-taking-to…
Read 4 tweets
Mar 14
6 Months ago my core tools barely included any AI.

Today things have shifted - a short update to this post:
1. Writing with 3 AI GPTs

When writing I consider 3 things:
- Finding citations to support the argument
- Putting ideas effectively on paper
- Skimming papers for logical relevance

ChatGPT can now do all of these with the help of GPTs:

effortlessacademic.com/a-complete-gui…
2. Semantic Search with SciSpace

Search for meaning not keywords. This is what AI enables us to do!

Check out this post:

Read 4 tweets
Mar 12
Webinar Apr 6th:
Literature Review & Academic Writing with AI

β†’ Find the most impactful literature quickly
β†’ Uncover reference gaps
β†’ Aid your writing process faithfully & ethically with AI

Link:

All details below:
πŸ‘‡effortlessacademic.com/elr3-webinar/Image
In this video I explain why the major changes in AI are such a big deal for literature reviews:
1. Semantic Literature Search

Semantic search allows you to obtain a comprehensive reading list on any literature review topic in under 1 minute.

This is brand new and released in January 2024.

We will look deeply at the caveats & solutions of this new method.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 5
How do you conduct a lit-review in 2024?

❌ Old way: Searching for papers by keywords on Google
βœ… New way: Semantic search using AI tools like SciSpace

Here is a demo:
πŸ‘‡ Image
1. AI Search

Internet search replaced tedious searches in libraries and journals.

Similarly, semantic search will replace the internet search.

AI allows to search answers to questions directly, rather than using keywords.

SciSpace is one such semantic search tool. Let's try!
2. @scispace_ on the GPT store

SciSpace is one of the top 10 GPTs (AI assistants) worldwide.

It harnesses the conversational abilities of ChatGPT and combines them with a database of 200 Million academic papers.

Start a conversation with this AI assistant:
Read 12 tweets

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