In the process of studying for my PhD general examinations this year, I ended up writing summaries about 200 academic books and articles.
AcaWiki is a wiki designed to host summaries of academic articles so it seemed like a great place to host these things. Over the last few months, I’ve uploaded all these summaries. Since I’ve finished, I’ve continued to add summaries of other articles as I read them.
My summaries tend to be rough. I write them, run them through a spellchecker, and then post them. I don’t even reread them before publishing. I hope to improve them as I reread them over time. Of course, because I’ve uploaded them to wiki, I hope others will add to and improve the summaries as well.
AcaWiki uses Semantic Mediawiki and provides nice platform for publishing, editing, and collaboration. Although there are still ways in which the platform can be better, what is needed now is, quite simply, more contributors. I am sad to see that my summaries make up a big chunk of all summaries on the site.
So if you are a student, an academic, or anyone else who writes or has written summaries of articles or books or if you might want to do so, you should consider contributing your summaries, in whatever form, to AcaWiki. I’ve done a little work to help integrate AcaWiki and Zotero which might make things easier.
Doctoral students reading for qualifying or general examinations in particular should should consider taking notes and studying with AcaWiki. From the student’s perspective, writing summaries can be one of the best way to reflect on and learn a literature. In the process, one can create a great resource for the rest of the world. If a single doctoral student from each of twenty diverse fields of study published summaries of the 200 key articles in their area, AcaWiki would have the critical core of what is most relevant in academia. Help us build it!