phd researcher
nest trails by topic. pin the claim that matters. read the argument back.
trails that mirror the thesis
one reading day
classic three-network model. their "alerting" maps onto what i have been calling baseline arousal. the disagreement i care about: is alerting separable from orienting.
the argument, in one scroll
| study | cohen's d | n |
|---|---|---|
| posner 1980 | 0.62 | 24 |
| jonides 1981 | 0.41 | 18 |
| exp 1 (mine) | 0.55 | 32 |
why not a reference manager
a reference manager stores what you read. it cannot store what you thought about it, because the thinking happened somewhere else: in a margin, in a different app, or not at all. a notes app stores the thinking and then buries it under everything else you typed that term.
the pins on a topic trail are the claims you judged worth keeping, in the order you met them, with the tables, figures, and sources still attached to each one. that is a literature review with the reasoning intact rather than a bibliography with a summary bolted on afterwards.
and the reading days themselves stay in memory rather than following you forward. they are supposed to. most of what you write while working through a paper is you arguing with it, which is the work, not the output.