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I’m a Chemical Engineering Ph.D. student at University of Florida who studies reactions catalyzed by microporous Brønsted acids using density functional theory (DFT). Theoretical applications form the backbone of our understanding of a plethora of reactions and nanoscale phenomena, from diffusion and transport phenomena to understanding catalyzed reactions.

Because of the widespread applicability of theory in industrial and academic work, and because of the volume of work using DFT to clarify reactions, managing and finding applicable literature in our field can often feel overwhelming (as it can in many fields!); F1000Workspace helps our lab share and capture literature in a simple fashion that’s unmatched.

Making collaboration easy

F1000Workspace is, plainly, the easiest way I have found to facilitate collaboration and article sharing for a group of researchers. We started using F1000Workspace when we stumbled on it in a search for an alternative to our previous reference manager, which had limited sharing capabilities and continually crashed when we were adding citations to our work in Microsoft Word documents. Because of the flexibility that shared projects afford article and manuscript organization, it’s easy for me to share my group’s large collection of articles with new students when they join our research group.

Our group had tried several other reference managers, but most lacked the sharing capabilities, streamlined features, and note-taking options that make F1000Workspace stand out. My adviser and peers have collected about a thousand articles, and we often found that sharing them was more difficult than it needed to be.

Dealing directly with a large volume of PDF documents saved in cloud storage was painful because it wasn’t easily searchable, even with a systematic file-naming system, and not all the relevant article information was readily available. Sharing articles published before widespread digitization was a particularly huge pain—if one person updated metadata for that article in his or her reference manager, which often needs to be updated manually, but shared the relevant PDF with another peer, metadata changes would be lost.

F1000Workspace allows us to maintain different projects with relevant articles copied to each project, with all necessary information attached: full article PDFs, supplementary information, and article metadata. It’s now easy to direct other students to an article by sharing a title, author name, or DOI, in a way that none of our previous options allowed.

Additional features to help sharing

Discovering F1000Workspace has expedited our group writing, reading, and sharing processes and saved us so much time relative to other reference managers that we’ve tried. Perhaps most critical is their responsiveness and enthusiasm when contacted; the F1000 team has always been extremely excited to hear any suggestions or reach out in response to my inquiries.

I’ve also enjoyed other additions that F1000Workspace has to offer — namely, the Browser Extension and their duplicate identification measures in the web program. Adding new articles to our library is also extremely easy. Between the watch folder and the Browser Extension, it’s been remarkably easy to add new articles and add notes.

If I add an article that is already in my group’s library, F1000Workspace quickly recognizes them as identical; if articles are incorrectly identified, fixing article metadata and weeding out duplicates is infinitely easier in F1000Workspace than in other reference managers.

Stumbling on F1000Workspace has been something of a revelation for us, as though we’d finally found a solution to all our reference-management issues.