3 replies to this topic

[allysonpb]

Hi -- I'm a PhD student in History and I use Evernote constantly: to keep track of the 100s of academic books I need to read for qualifying exams, to take detailed, organized notes on primary sources and research, and to keep track of writing and ideas. However, there are a lot of programs out there that my colleagues prefer to use because of their citation capabilities (like Refworks, Zotero, Endnote). Right now, I have to manually reproduce bibliographic citations from my notes when I write in Word, or I separately use Zotero, which can be a pain. Anyone have suggestions for ways to organize citations and bibliographies?

Overall, I'd love to see Evernote expand its abilities for citations, even linking up with Zotero on web browsers. I find the organization -- and ability to import old documents that are word-searchable -- incredibly, incredibly helpful. I believe many other grad students and academics would prefer the easy-to-use interface to more expensive programs, too.

Thanks!

[GrumpyMonkey]

Hi -- I'm a PhD student in History and I use Evernote constantly: to keep track of the 100s of academic books I need to read for qualifying exams, to take detailed, organized notes on primary sources and research, and to keep track of writing and ideas. However, there are a lot of programs out there that my colleagues prefer to use because of their citation capabilities (like Refworks, Zotero, Endnote). Right now, I have to manually reproduce bibliographic citations from my notes when I write in Word, or I separately use Zotero, which can be a pain. Anyone have suggestions for ways to organize citations and bibliographies?

Overall, I'd love to see Evernote expand its abilities for citations, even linking up with Zotero on web browsers. I find the organization -- and ability to import old documents that are word-searchable -- incredibly, incredibly helpful. I believe many other grad students and academics would prefer the easy-to-use interface to more expensive programs, too.

Thanks!

hi. welcome to the forums! i have written a little bit about evernote in academia on my website:
http://www.princeton...teresearch.html

more to your point about what to do about bibliographies, i do the following:

1. i keep a note called "120114 index bibliography" that contains all of my bibliographic information in one file with entries in cms bibliographic and footnote style.
2. i take notes on each source using titles like this "120409 reading monkey grumpy 2011"
3. i digitize and upload all of my sources, giving them titles like this "monkey grumpy 2011". i paste the bibliographic information into the top of the note, but otherwise, never edit this file. if i annotate something, i upload the file separately with a title like "monkey grumpy 2011"

i've used pretty much all of the major bibliographic software available. i have no complaints about them, except that they are more trouble than they are worth. it sounds great to have all of your footnotes magically appear with properly footnoted citations and perfect bibliographies, but i rarely enjoy the show (mainly because of asian characters and translated titles), and they basically force you to use some kind of word processing software every time you want to write something. no thanks

[syntaxfree]

I have half a foot in academia, but I'm not an academic myself -- we're a think-tank producing white literature, but rely heavily on the progress of academia itself.

There's a good application for Macintosh called Papers.app; it will scan your .pdf covers and match them against JSTOR and such. I used to use that very extensively -- the metadata tracking is just fabulous -- it's iTunes for PDFs. But I recently dragged in all my collection into Evernote simply because I can't haul my Macbook all the places I need to be anymore, and I had no use for the extreme metadata tracking -- particularly since I don't do my own bibliographies, I send out the source PDFs so they can be checked and so on.

So what I do is essentially an iteration of my "search and tag" routine. When I have some free time, I search for stuff that's been on my mind and tag the results. (Sometimes it's more automatic; I can flat out tag anything that answers for "Visa" as a receipt). If you're focused on one research area you can probably do some very fine tagging.

That said, it's possible that Papers.app is the right knife for this meat.

[fflav]

Yes, Paper2 is a great choice. It integrates with EN as well. Here's a short summary how it can be used for research and brainstorming http://www.fflav.com...esearch-day-11/