Both Windows Search and OSX Spotlight automatically index the contents of pdfs, making it easy to find all the papers in a personal library pertaining to say, Wigglesworthia. Fortunately, in front of a laptop it is generally possibly to find what you want by keyword search. If I can’t find a reference by a keyword search it doesn’t exist in my universe. Some people seem to have a great mental filing system for authors, dates, and subjects of key articles, and can pull a critical reference from the depths of their hard drive based on title alone. Unfortunately this switch didn’t reduce the volume of literature that catches my eye, it merely insured that all the literature would be relevant, interesting, and even more important to file away somewhere and remember. I gave up trying to stay on top of journal tables-of-contents a long time ago, instead I rely on Google Scholar alerts to notify me when relevant publications come out. This comes not only from the overwhelming amount of data from analyses I’m working on, but from an ever-growing stream of scientific literature. Like everyone else in Academia I’m in a constant struggle against information overload.
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