Increasing efficiency in doing research for scholarly writing
Michael Lissack
Applied Philosopher of Science -- Writer -- Entrepreneur (Opinions and Postings are my own views and do not reflect the views of the institutions with which I am affiliated.)
Thought you might find my new approach interesting
It saves me roughly 60% of the time I might otherwise spend
Step 1: Write a brief synopsis of the intended article (or create a list of 4-5 keywords)
Step 2: Post that synopsis (or the keyword list) to https://myresearchtool.com
Step 3: Go to the resulting Google Scholar links
Step 4: For each article with an interesting/seemingly relevant brief description open a new browser tab (you will want to find the doi)
Step 5: use the doi for each article to find a downloadable copy (I use zlibrary but you may have access to other sources) -- convert to OCR'd pdf if necessary (I use Zamzar)
Step 6: place all the downloaded pdfs in a folder then for ease of use renumber
Step 7: run each pdf through the summarization engine at RESOOMER on the right hand side of the resoomer interface go to analyze
Step 8: go through the highlighted sentences to extract possible quotations or citations
as an example see the text at https://michaellissack.com/Original.pdf whose 1450 pages becomes roughly 100 pages to read at https://michaellissack.com/HighlightedSummary1.pdf (100 pages of highlights but located within 300 pages for context)
This example is part of the research for an article I am writing on "How Abductive Reasoning Really Works: Cybernetic Principles in Action"
Corporate Writer | AVP of Communications at Wells Fargo
4 年I wrote my PhD this way, very fast and while holding down a job. Instead of resoomer, I used speed-reading techniques.
Applied Philosopher of Science -- Writer -- Entrepreneur (Opinions and Postings are my own views and do not reflect the views of the institutions with which I am affiliated.)
4 年The Resoomer step is what creates efficiency. Either the software does a good enough job so that the highlighted text is useful to you or it does not. The highlighted text allows for a speedier extraction of good items to cite or quote. It is NOT a replacement for reading the full text of an article, but most of the time one does not need to actually read the full text if the task is "find good quotes which support or reject or somehow illustrate point x.". An alternative method would involve doing the task twice -- once to get a sense of a first set of downloaded literature, then write a second brief or synopsis, and use the second run to find good quotes. The do it twice method might be better if the author is unfamiliar with the argument being examined.
Director and Principal Tutor, Avancier Limited
4 年Interesting. I worry about the resoomer (resumer?) step. The difficulty I have with much if not most systems thinking discussion is the casual copying and pasting of terms, phases and aphorisms from one science into articles and papers on another. The words get copied, but the concepts don't. The result is a jumble of terms and concepts which sound profound, yet turn out to be impenetrably confused when studied more closely. Oher authors readers then interpret the result how they like, and quote from it to support what they write. Nowadays, the longer the reference list, the more suspicious I am. FYI, since 2011, wrt cybernetics I have been struggling to disentangle the confused and confusing state of systems thinking discussion in "the book" at https://bit.ly/2yXGImr. You might be interested in chapters 1 and 4. If I understand the concept, abductive reasoning was used to form (e.g.) the top 10 ideas in Ashby's cybernetics, the 8 kinds of system change, and the distilled summary of activity system theory.