On the good side, instead of hauling dusty volumes off shelves and standing over the photocopier, I sit comfortably in my office, downloading papers from journal Web sites.
On the bad side, this has produced informational bedlam.
The journal articles arrive with file names like 456330a.pdf or sd-article121.pdf. Keeping track of what these are, what I have, where I’ve put them, which other papers are related to them — hopeless...
And so, absurdly, it became easier to re-research a subject each time I wanted to think about it, and to download the papers again. My hard drive has filled up with duplicates; my office, with stalagmites of paper.
Like Judson, I'm trying to use the software Papers to deal with journal glut. It's essentially iTunes for your documents, and in general it works great.
But it lacks one critical feature: a warning that the paper you're about to download is only going to waste your time. I've got my papers organized, but it does me little good because I usually end up downloading 6 months worth of reading in a week. So it's all organized nicely for me in Papers, but I've read hardly any of it because it's difficult to know where to start digging through my massive digital stacks.
For 99% of the papers any of us looks at, the abstract is probably good enough. Before online journals, you at least had to ask yourself if the paper was worth the trip to the library and the $2.00 to copy it. Papers should implement some sort of similar barrier for compulsive downloaders like me.
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