How I Organize My Research Links and Resources

Research involves keeping track of a lot of material: papers, references, and links that might become useful later. This is my first attempt at documenting how I organize that material, starting with one small part of the process: saving links and making them easy to find again.

Starting with bookmarks

I use Brave heavily for saving papers, references, and research links. I’ve found that it helps to stick to one browser: everything ends up in the same place, the organization stays consistent, and saving something becomes almost automatic. I’ve used Brave for more than seven years now, so a lot of this is simply habit, and bookmarks give me a natural place to collect resources while I’m browsing.

I’ve grown to like Brave for a few other reasons as well. I use Brave Search, and I particularly like its dark layout. (Yeah, I’m a very visual person. I like specific layouts, and I would one hundred percent do things or buy things just because I like the visual experience, even if it might not be the best.) I also prefer how the overall experience feels less tied to any ecosystem. For the kind of research browsing I do, its advantage is less about raw relevance and more about the search experience: fewer incentives toward heavily personalized results, an independent search index, and third-party ads and trackers blocked by default. This makes long browsing sessions feel cleaner and less distracting.

How I structure my bookmarks

In Brave, I generally maintain separate profiles for the major parts of my life. Right now, I have a Ph.D. profile and a personal profile. Previously, I had profiles for personal projects, research, internship applications, and other contexts. Keeping these spaces separate means the bookmarks, tabs, and browsing context for one part of my life don’t get mixed up with everything else. It also keeps the things I need close at hand.

Within each profile, I use bookmark folders for another layer of organization. Since my Ph.D. is my main focus right now, that profile has folders such as:

I have many more folders as well, and the exact list changes with my work. These days, I try to put papers related to a specific project directly into that project’s folder, while papers that I find interesting but that aren’t related to any of my current projects go into Daily reads. I’m less interested in maintaining a perfect taxonomy now; I mostly want to save the papers I really like somewhere I can easily find them later.

I also save links to interesting robotics startups and DIY robot hardware I come across. This isn’t always directly related to my research; I simply enjoy sending those videos and projects to friends and family who aren’t closely involved with robotics. They really enjoy seeing them, and I like having a place where I can find them again. The basic idea stays the same: every link has a context, which makes it much easier to find something when I need to reference it again or send it to someone.

The problem with this system is that it feels very local. Since everything lives in the browser, I have this lingering fear that it could all disappear someday. I wanted another copy somewhere I could easily access and search, so I decided to use a Google Sheet as an external index.

A searchable index of research links

Brave bookmarks → Python script → Google Sheets
Scheduled every morning with macOS launchd.

The script reads Brave’s local bookmark file, walks through its folders, and collects the saved links. It then replaces the existing rows in a Google Sheet with the current bookmark collection. The sheet keeps four pieces of information for each bookmark:

• Name: the saved title of the paper or resource.
• URL: a link back to the original page.
• Folder: the immediate bookmark folder it belongs to.
• Date added: when the bookmark was saved.

For now, I keep only the immediate folder name in the sheet. This keeps the index compact, although it doesn’t preserve the full folder hierarchy from Brave. Once the automation is set up, saving a bookmark remains the only manual step.

The quick version of the setup

1. Find the local Bookmarks file for the Brave profile you want to back up.
2. Create a Google Sheet and enable access to it through the Google Sheets API.
3. Write a small Python script that reads Brave’s bookmark JSON, extracts the fields you want, and writes them to the sheet.
4. Run the script once manually and complete the Google authentication step.
5. Create a macOS launchd job that runs the script automatically every morning.

If you haven’t set up something like this before, an LLM can walk you through each step and help adapt the paths and script to your own computer. You don’t need to understand every part before starting; you can go one step at a time, test that it works, and then move on to the next one.

What this helps with, and what it doesn’t

The Google Sheet gives me a human-readable index and a second copy of my saved links. It’s a convenient place to search through the collection and revisit resources. Because each run replaces the previous contents, the sheet reflects the current bookmark collection; it isn’t a history of everything I’ve ever saved. It also doesn’t store the papers themselves or preserve the complete browser folder structure. Archiving dated copies of the original bookmark file is one possible addition. If you want to go one step further, you could give this list to an LLM and use it to create mind maps, identify themes, or build other ways of exploring the collection. I think having the raw document opens up many more possible workflows.

For now, this is a starting point. I’ll keep refining it as I work out which habits are useful enough to keep.