My Citation Management System: To Read Someday/Maybe

(see previous entries for other parts of this system)
This is an endnote database that I throw references into as I hear about
them, that I might want to read (someday, maybe). What's the motivation
for going to the trouble of looking them up and putting them in the
database? Well first of all it's not that much trouble - if you can import
citations off the web it's fast, much faster even if you can import from
ISI Web of Science directly within endnote. Secondly, it means its then
searchable, including metadata like the abstract and keywords. So you're
in a mood for a face perception paper, you can find all the ones you've
been planning to read. Third, you don't have to look it up again when
you've read it, you can just move it over to Read. Finally, you don't have
to actually find the citation if you don't want to: you could just make a
new one and toss in the author and year, and it will still be useful as a
marker that you ran across this paper once.

I don't use this for lit searches, where I'm reading intensely in some
area, but rather for those papers that pop up just outseide of my current
reading area but could be very important later on. What would you read
next if you were suddenly handed a bunch of time that could only be used
for reading?

A couple of refinements: I added a field called "Read For" so that months
down the line I could remember just why the heck I meant to read it in the
first place. I put just a few words in, like "Recent massive review of
visual search" or "Contextual cueing in a nautral context, maybe relevant
to virtual creatures", like a tiny sales pitch to my future self. I
set up the Read Someday/Maybe database to be sorted by record number, that
is the order it was added to the database, so more recently added showed
up on top. This worked well with my realization that this database would
never get emptied out, would only grow and grow as I went on, so best to
keep the focus on the ones I was excited about recently. As another
consequence I have stopped removing citations as I read them (and move
them to Read), but rather leave them there just with their "Order Read"
field filled in (in preparation for copying to Read) so I know I've gotten
to that one.

This system is far from perfect. For one thing papers do get lost down in
there - there's not a huge motivation to go trolling down into it to find
something to print and read, except on certain occasions, like for a plane
ride I might peak into it. But usually not all the way to the bottom,
which has stuff totalyl irrelevant to what I'm doing now. The fact that it
is searchable mitigates this. But to be honest I'm a bit scared of the
hugeness of the list now. Nevertheless it works pretty well for me to
capture the important papers that fly my way that I can't sit down to read
right now.