Guide
How to organize research
Research goes wrong at the end, not the beginning. During the project everything is in your head, so any storage works. Three months later the material is intact and completely mute.
What you're really preserving is the reasoning, not the sources.
01 · Step one
Capture the claim, not just the source.
A PDF in a folder tells you nothing about why it's there. The thing worth keeping is the specific claim, chart or paragraph that mattered, which is why screenshots of a single figure often outlive the paper they came from.
One line is enough: what this shows, and what it argues against. Ten seconds at capture time is the highest-return effort in all of research management.
02 · Step two
Organise by question, not by source type.
Folders called PDFs, Links and Notes are sorted by file format, which is never how you think. Folders per question, do people abandon during onboarding, what do competitors charge for teams, match the shape of the work.
Questions also age well. Formats don't, and neither do project codenames.
- Open question
- What you're trying to settle. The unit of research.
- Evidence
- The specific figure, quote or screenshot that moves it.
- Counter-evidence
- Keep it. Research without it is just collection.
- Conclusion
- Two sentences, written the day you decide. Nobody regrets this.
03 · Step three
Preserve adjacency: it's free context.
The things you gathered in one session belong together, and that grouping happens automatically if the material keeps its time. Being able to see what you read either side of a paper reconstructs a surprising amount of your reasoning.
This is why chronological views outperform careful taxonomies for research: the chronology was recorded for free and it maps onto how the thinking developed.
Research is a sequence of thoughts. Keep the sequence.
04 · Where Shelf fits
Sources, screenshots and notes in one local library.
Shelf reads PDFs, images and links locally, writes short summaries and topics, keeps the timeline of what you gathered when, and connects saves that share a subject, document or day. Notes sit alongside the sources rather than in a separate app.
It won't manage citations or bibliographies. For formal academic work, a reference manager still does a job Shelf doesn't.
Next thought
The real test of any system is what happens months later.
How to find something you saved months agoIf this idea interested you…
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.