I saw a query that had a link to a post from a couple of years ago that I missed at the time. It’s by Anand Iyer who is—or, perhaps, was—a graduate student and therefore is constantly reading papers. When you’re faced with reading and writing papers, one of the must-have tools is some sort of document management system.
Iyer’s solution is to use Emacs, Org-mode, John Kitchin’s org-ref, and Sebastian Christ’s interleave. I’ve written about all of those before but Iyer’s post ties them all together into a compelling workflow. If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at Kitchin’s video on org-ref. It shows how easy it is to add papers to your bibliography and—at the same time—download copies of the PDF.
Interleave lets you takes notes on the paper you’re reading. The notes are synchronized to the part of the paper they’re about. It’s a great way of making notes about a paper or, really, any PDF document.
Sadly, nothing can make reading or writing papers easy but using the tools Iyer discusses can largely automate most of the administrative chores. Iyer’s post is interesting and well worth a few minutes of your time. He has a section that shows you how easy it is to configure a basic system so you can get started using it right away.