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Evernote for Academics?


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Posted

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!

  • Level 5*
Posted

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.edu/~cmayo/evernoteresearch.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 :)

Posted

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.

  • 9 months later...
  • 10 months later...
Posted

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!

 

Thanks for your post allysonpb, I too have this problem as a masters student in healthcare research. Evernote is brilliant for clipping articles in my works, as medical research spans a vast array of databases, each having varying capability to save and access full text. Therefore, to save in one place so easily as I go along is extremely valuable. That said, the process would be even more efficient if Evernote had the capability to either act as a citation 'manager' for clipped/saved articles, or like you said to collaborate with a citation management company in some way. So my response leads on to a question to Evernote, do you have any plans to support this?

Posted

It is easy to wish...but Evernote is simply not a citation manager, and adding such capability is pretty esoteric.  ;-) I use Zotero to manage my citations and Evernote to collect articles, notes, and synthesis pages (think mini-lit reviews on constructs, issues relevant to my field, etc).  

 

Evernote's strength is as an info/knowledge collector.   I think that using something like Evernote to aid in academic work reduces the time wasted by grad students who read (mountains of) articles in their courses and then forget them.   It seems reasonable to me that students should collect these articles  along with a tagged summary of each into their EN system.  Tags can represent how concepts are related in your field.  As coursework progresses, their knowledge base grows, and EN's related notes feature helps them recall and make connections.   The idea:

 

Accumulated Knowledge + Personal Creativity (fostered by more connections) = More Value from Grad School Ordeal. ;-)

 

I have been working with freshman (and grad students and faculty members) to explore the use of EN to create "personal knowledge bases" and use these PKBs for thinking, studying, and writing.   When I asked my freshman to reflect on the process this semester, almost all said something to the effect of:  I thought of EN/PKB as an intrusion at first, but now it has changed the way I ...  insert:  (think, use information, take notes, collect resources related to my intended career, think about myself as a thinker, etc.) . 

 

The group that I work with has compiled some resources around using Evernote for academics that are located at www.evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com.

 

I hope these resources inspire others to think along these lines.  I look forward to reading others' ideas along these lines. 

  • Level 5*
Posted

It is easy to wish...but Evernote is simply not a citation manager, and adding such capability is pretty esoteric.  ;-) I use Zotero to manage my citations and Evernote to collect articles, notes, and synthesis pages (think mini-lit reviews on constructs, issues relevant to my field, etc).  

 

Evernote's strength is as an info/knowledge collector.   I think that using something like Evernote to aid in academic work reduces the time wasted by grad students who read (mountains of) articles in their courses and then forget them.   It seems reasonable to me that students should collect these articles  along with a tagged summary of each into their EN system.  Tags can represent how concepts are related in your field.  As coursework progresses, their knowledge base grows, and EN's related notes feature helps them recall and make connections.   The idea:

 

Accumulated Knowledge + Personal Creativity (fostered by more connections) = More Value from Grad School Ordeal. ;-)

 

I have been working with freshman (and grad students and faculty members) to explore the use of EN to create "personal knowledge bases" and use these PKBs for thinking, studying, and writing.   When I asked my freshman to reflect on the process this semester, almost all said something to the effect of:  I thought of EN/PKB as an intrusion at first, but now it has changed the way I ...  insert:  (think, use information, take notes, collect resources related to my intended career, think about myself as a thinker, etc.) . 

 

The group that I work with has compiled some resources around using Evernote for academics that are located at www.evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com.

 

I hope these resources inspire others to think along these lines.  I look forward to reading others' ideas along these lines.

That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.

I used Evernote as a graduate student and now I use it in my classes to create a shared knowledge database with my students. In the shared notebook we use for each undergraduate course we have PDFs of handouts, PDFs of readings, study guides bibliographies, class notes taken by the students, photographs of the blackboard for each day, copies of discussion board threads from Blackboard, news clippings related to the course content, etc., etc. It has been quite beneficial. I'll eventually write it up in a blog post, but for now i can say that the experiment has been a success. Hopefully, students will carry all of this with them and build further on it for the rest of their time in college.

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

 

It is easy to wish...but Evernote is simply not a citation manager, and adding such capability is pretty esoteric.  ;-) I use Zotero to manage my citations and Evernote to collect articles, notes, and synthesis pages (think mini-lit reviews on constructs, issues relevant to my field, etc).  

 

Evernote's strength is as an info/knowledge collector.   I think that using something like Evernote to aid in academic work reduces the time wasted by grad students who read (mountains of) articles in their courses and then forget them.   It seems reasonable to me that students should collect these articles  along with a tagged summary of each into their EN system.  Tags can represent how concepts are related in your field.  As coursework progresses, their knowledge base grows, and EN's related notes feature helps them recall and make connections.   The idea:

 

Accumulated Knowledge + Personal Creativity (fostered by more connections) = More Value from Grad School Ordeal. ;-)

 

I have been working with freshman (and grad students and faculty members) to explore the use of EN to create "personal knowledge bases" and use these PKBs for thinking, studying, and writing.   When I asked my freshman to reflect on the process this semester, almost all said something to the effect of:  I thought of EN/PKB as an intrusion at first, but now it has changed the way I ...  insert:  (think, use information, take notes, collect resources related to my intended career, think about myself as a thinker, etc.) . 

 

The group that I work with has compiled some resources around using Evernote for academics that are located at www.evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com.

 

I hope these resources inspire others to think along these lines.  I look forward to reading others' ideas along these lines.

That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.

I used Evernote as a graduate student and now I use it in my classes to create a shared knowledge database with my students. In the shared notebook we use for each undergraduate course we have PDFs of handouts, PDFs of readings, study guides bibliographies, class notes taken by the students, photographs of the blackboard for each day, copies of discussion board threads from Blackboard, news clippings related to the course content, etc., etc. It has been quite beneficial. I'll eventually write it up in a blog post, but for now i can say that the experiment has been a success. Hopefully, students will carry all of this with them and build further on it for the rest of their time in college.

 

This sounds like a good idea.  Do your students buy-in to the shared notebook idea, i.e. do they contribute on their own?  I'd love to hear more about how you integrate this type of collection so that your students see it as an important feature of your course. 

 

Jay

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