My personal definition of a Digital Workflow: the execution and automation of research processes where tasks, information or documents are passed from one digital program to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
Why do you need a digital workflow? Because you spend too much time 1) finding articles, 2) downloading and naming files, 3) annotating and editing pdfs, and 4) organizing and citing research.
I’m still working on my own digital workflow for my dissertation. Currently, I’m piloting some combination of Google Drive, Mendely or Zotero. I would love to hear your advice on setting up a digital workflow for academic research!
Here is a PDF that I found on Pinterest from Monica D.T. Rysavy, PhD at http://monicarysavy.com/ that outlines her digital workflow:
iDoGrants by Holly Zink 
My workflow goes something like this.
** Setup **
Set up an account on Google Scholar.
Find how to access Google Scholar through your university library cache.
Install Zotero desktop.
Install the Zotero plugin for your browser.
Install the Zotero plugin for your word processor.
Install the Zotero plugin that records how many citations Google Scholar thinks each article has.
** Discovery workflow **
1. Search Google Scholar (via your uni library’s lovely authorisation process).
2. Find an interesting article.
3. Suck it into Zotero via the browser plugin.
3.1. If your library subscribes to the journal, the PDF will automagically be sucked in, too.
4. Consider whether you should create a Google alert for any of the authors of this article.
4.1. Consider whether your current search is returning enough useful searches to warrant saving it as a Google alert.
5. For those PDFs that arrive through other, more mysterious, processes, use Zotero’s ‘metadata from PDF’ feature. Magic when it works.
5.1 Ditto the ‘Add via DOI’ feature.
** Reading workflow **
6. Sort via ‘date added to Zotero’.
7. Double click to open PDF.
7.1. If there is no PDF and it looks really interesting, go hunt for PDF and add to Zotero.
8. Store notes in Zotero.
8.1. If you really like the articles, write notes as an email and send it to the authors.
LikeLike