In the last 20 years, the profession of research has changed. It still involves a lot of reading and taking notes. Here are a few memories from the pre-digital era with hard earned wisdoms on how NOT to collect your references:

Don't keep your references in an excel file

When I was a young student, this researcher showed me his one large excel file that had all his literature references and his notes. And I remember wondering: "Impressive! So this is part of the professional work? There must be a better solution." In fact, there are many solutions. Some are dangerous.

Don't take a shopping cart to the library

Once I had to fetch every volume from the last 5 years of some printed journals. I needed a shopping cart. Back at the office, the professor skimmed the abstracts and took a few notes which we had to copy by hand into a reference manager. Then, I pushed 200 pounds of research back across town and almost killed someone when the cart wanted to go down the metro stairs by itself.

Don't lock yourself in to a reference manager

During my studies, I tried many different reference managers. The danger of lock-in is still considerable. I started on Endnote, but then I changed institutions and no longer had a license. I tried Sente. It was discontinued. I used Papers by mekentosj. It was bought by a publishing house. I went to Bookends. It was Mac only and my new university workplace only had PC. I started on citavi. But it is PC only and when I went back to a Mac, I was stuck once more.

Choose wisely. Choose Zotero.

When doing research, collect your references and use a reference manager. Go digital and paperless. Trust an open source community to avoid lock-in. In case you are still looking around, Zotero is a good choice.