Sort papers by importance and relevance
Fred Brooks recommends this system for organizing research papers into a queue for processing.
How it works
Rank each paper according to two categories:
- Importance: How impactful is this particular paper or resource to the field? Do others reference it? Is it written by an influential group or team?
- Relevance: How relevant is this paper for your specific research questions and interests?
Usually an intuitive ranking of the paper can be reached by simply reading the abstract or, lacking that, skimming the first few paragraphs.
Fred recommended only 4 levels within each category:
- Rank Importance from 1-4, 1 being most important.
- Rank Relevance from A-D, A being most relevant.
This yields a convenient two-axis sort. Ideally, you would read the 1A's first, and then you can decide how to proceed, prioritizing either relevance or importance.
Advantages
One advantage of this approach is that you don't have to spend time adding tags or categorizing papers. This yields a single, flat list of all papers that can be sorted using importance and relevance. This saves time spent organizing for reading, processing, and writing.
Drawbacks
One caveat is that as your research questions and interests change, Relevance may also change. You may need to re-rank the relevance of the papers occasionally, but in practice this seems to happen fairly rarely.