Record Keeping

Welcome back after that awful fall semester. This semester is better, I'm getting 3 credits to fool around here!

I guess I'll just jump back in where I was back in October, how to track articles? This issue keeps nagging me. I can't shake the feeling that I'm spending most of my time in culdesacs of esoteric physics and reading many papers on the arxiv that will never even see a peer reviewer let alone the contents page of a journal.

I'll probably never get around to developing the kind of reference analysis tools I'd like to have. NASA ADS is probably one of the best online databases I could use, and there is Perl code I can get, but I dont know perl or object oriented programming to really make any use of it. Its not really clear from the ADS documentation the true extent of the database to the regions of physics I wish to hunt through with my own algorithms. How many records have all the citations recorded? Which records? My ideal database would have

• ApJ
• Physical review D
• Physical review Letters
• General Relativity and Gravitation
• Nature
• some proceedings that I dont know about
• other important journals that I dont know about

This is my ideal database, so I would want to make some discoveries like the awesomely apt conference or obscure-but-neat journal.

I think the best thing I can do right now is to build my own database of papersI have read. The easiest way I can think of to do this is to get BiBTeX entries for each reading into one file. This will make citations easier at least. I wonder if I have the patience for that.