Re: how do scientists use org mode?

["Sven Bretfeld" <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch>]

Hi Christoph

For my scientific work (I'm an Indologist) I use orgmode in three ways:

1. _Project planning and calendar management_

   That's just the normal thing. I use the GTD approach, extended by
   some specialties like the tags :BIGROCK: (most important project to
   work on this week) and :MIT: (most important thing of the day).

2. _Writing papers_

   To me this is one of the most important powers of orgmode: work on
   papers and have Todos inserted into the text directly. So, if you
   have referenced a book but you don't have it at hand at the moment,
   you can do:

   This is a paraphrase you need a reference for (Smith 2009: ??).
   TODO Check the page in Smith's book           :LIBRARY:

   I always add files with draft papers to org-agenda-files. Next time
   I'm at the library and have MobileOrg with me, the Todo shows up and
   I can check the book. I know of no other wordprocessor or editor
   which can do this.

3. _Collecting reference material_

   Whenever I read a book (since some months I usually read ebooks or
   pdfs on my tablet), I find passages I need for present or future
   papers. With the ezReader app (Android) you can mark these passages
   and send them to MobileOrg. When I come home, the new material has
   already synced and waits to be tagged and refiled. I use org-files
   for each paper I'm working on as databases for references. The header
   is a short description of the content of each reference. Keywords and
   bibliographic data are put into drawers that can be queried. I have
   an Emacs macro that automatically transforms the raw entry into the
   right markup.

Welcome to org

Sven

GMX Christoph 13 <christoph-13@gmx.net> writes:

> Hi
> this is my first post here and although I am evaluating org mode with great interest, I am also asking myself in which way other scientists are making use of org mode. It will take a while to get my head around how to accomplish certain things in org mode but for the moment I am intrigued by *why* one would want to approach the problem of organizing one's research with org mode and in which way. 
> Are you putting exclusively your todos in, well, your todo file and perhaps keep project-related things, such as data and progress, notes, ideas etc. somewhere else? Or do you embed your notes and todos within their original context, i.e. is org mode your one-stop solution for data management? Do you maintain a separate file for every major project you are responsible for or involved in or throw everything into one or few humungous  files and differentiate using hierarchies and tags? 
> In the past I have hit some road blocks not so much with other softwares but rather concepts such as GTD, which I think is tailored to the needs of people outside science, so I would deeply appreciate your views and experience.
>
> If this list is geared towards the proximate aspects of development and less towards philosophy of usage, I apologize
>
> Christoph