Although many of us prefer reading research articles in print format, using colorful highlighters to mark important sections we wish to return to, and hand writing notes about ideas we’d like to remember or share with colleagues later, a downside to adding annotations and highlights to printed articles is that they are not searchable nor easily shareable. The individual copy of the article that we mark up is ours and ours alone and we will have to scan through the whole text to re-locate the needed passage.

Another option: take advantage of the easy-to-use functionality of reference management software programs that allow users to create and search on electronic annotations! For example, Endnote gives users the ability to add notes and highlight text in PDFs and then to keyword search on these PDF notes.

And thanks to a browser extension offered by F1000Workspace, notes can be made directly on PDFs and webpages too! (For example, annotations and highlights can be added directly to PubMed abstracts on the Internet.)

Learn more by asking us at the MSK Library!