Gmail the Organiser

Even as I plunge into my ISM on open quantums systems, I am keeping a lookout for the latest journal articles published on the Los Alamos National Laboratory pre-print archive, which is where almost all the final drafts of articles to be submitted to journals are uploaded. This is so as to keep track of the latest developments in that field and get an idea of the kinds of project I can do.

However, the archive, being a site for pre-print, sees a whole lot of articles everyday. Even in the sub-section for quantum physics alone, there is on average ten articles a day, out of which I can usually find one or two that is related to open quantum systems. Add that up over days and weeks and months, I think I will have a substantial collection of articles at my disposal. Of course, the problem then comes: how do I organise all these journal articles and, especially, how to know what each of them discusses about? The abstract should give one an idea of what the paper discusses, but if you have a hundred articles, reading through all the abstracts can be quite maddening.

That's when Gmail comes in handy because of its features. One, it uses labels, which means I can attach different keywords to each article, making a search on a particular idea easier. Two, it has an amazing amount of space, so no worries that I'll max out the space given. Three, it's not housed in my computer, so unless Googleplex collapses, I can be assured that I won't lose the articles. Four, Gmail will be accessible to anyone who needs to search for articles in open quantum systems, e.g. my supervisor.

Right now, the Gmail account is still empty... because I have yet to go through any of the articles I've collected in details yet. But I cannot foresee any troubles with this plan. Yet.