Sam and I are going to begin work soon on a crumb-picking sort of literature review where information pulled from hundreds of observations will need to be meticulously organized. I use EndNote as a reference manager, and I've been pretty happy with it. If I could change one thing, I'd make it possible to color code references within a library.
Anyways, Sam said he's planning to use Zotero for this project. If you use Zotero I'd love to hear what you think of it.
I was also reading today about iWork, since I'll be getting a new computer before long and don't particularly want to deal with Office 2008. After reading reviews at of iWork, though, it sounds like I'm not in the target audience and so I'm probably stuck with Microsoft since I need the program to cooperate with reference managers and use things like equation editor and higher Excel functions.
4 comments:
I'm currently running leopard on my comp as well as windows office 2008, and its not as bad as the office 2007 (for windows). It's decent, and is fairly simular in feel like the office 2004 for mac.
I've been using RefWorks for a year and a half. I switched from RefWorks to Zotero in half an hour today. And it's been going wonderfully. I definitely suggest it.
Office 2008 had some glitches (and by glitches I mean it was f**king useless with large worksheets) with Excel on the Mac, but I think they've been resolved.
Dear Karina,
another resource for those interested in research management tools is Mendeley (www.mendeley.com, I'm one of the co-founders of Mendeley.)
Different from Zotero, Mendeley Desktop is not a Firefox plugin, but a free cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) software for managing, sharing and tagging research papers. You can also back up and synchronize your library with Mendeley Web and access it from everywhere, either on Mendeley Web or via Mendeley Desktop on a different PC.
Then, based on the users’ paper collections, Mendeley Web anonymously aggregates research statistics and also connects like-minded researchers and academics. In the future, we hope to build a large and open semantic database of research papers, sort of like a “Last.fm for research”.
It's a different approach than Zotero, but you might want to try it as well. Keep in mind that we just launched into public beta, but we are working with some of the people who co-founded Last.fm (www.last.fm) and Skype to improve Mendeley's features.
Take care
Jan
Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
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