Organizing scientific research files

Until now, most of my scientific papers were written in a background context, like my MSc thesis or a course. So, all the conference and paper related files were stored in a subdirectory of the broader subject.

Now, I want to advance to a more research-centered approach to my work, so I need to organize my files in a more structured way for this purpose.

After some thinking and experimenting, the outline of the directory structure I’m using is the following:

/Research

-/ Conferences
-- disapproved.doc (list of disapproved conferences, for their questionable scientific merits)
--/
--- agenda.doc (list of incoming conferences for the year, including all relevant dates, including, sorted by submission deadline)
---/ (ex. IEEE ICWS)
---- url.txt (web address of conference web page)
---- desc.txt (conference name and topic keywords)
---- … (other conference related files: forms, rules of submission, templates etc.)

-/ Journals
… (similar to conferences)

-/ Researchers
--/ me (my research)
---/ presentations
----/
---- …
---/ publications
----/
---- … (my papers)
--/ other
---/ ,
---- …

I hope this way I can more easily store my files, helping me to work in a more practical approach, similar to what happened in the final stages of my MSc. If I target specific publications, I can use the conference’s deadlines as Occam’s razors for my work – keep it simple, keep it focused, reach results!

Let’s see if it works ;-)

Starting LaTeX

I wrote my MSc thesis in Microsoft Word, and took great advantage of Word’s easy to use features, especially the Outline view, that allowed me to hierarchically structure my document and to view it at a glance, during the writing process. However, the handling of references – a core aspect of scientific writing – was cumbersome, to say the least.

So, I decided to try the most used tool for writing scientific papers: LaTeX. Actually, LaTeX is one extension to the basic language TeX. Whereas TeX specifies basic text and math expressions formatting, LaTeX adds capabilities to structure documents, with indexes. Also, there is BibTeX to handle references. There any many library packages for TeX. In fact, its extensibility is one of its key features. You can find lots of information about these widely used tools on the Internet. However, beware; they are not in the same difficulty level as Word, because they require the use of the command prompt.

There is a myriad TeX variants, for different platforms. The most complete I found out for Windows is MiKTeX. The main command line tools are latex and pdflatex. The latter one produces output directly in PDF format.

I still haven’t actually written any full document, just a couple of tests, but I plan to do so in my future papers.

Best regards!