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[niceday]

Euro_trash, Zotero does all that, total breeze. Multiple groups, batch-edit, etc.

I still remain unconvinced that Endnote allows for unlimited number of notes fields *per* reference, each with its own tags. I just looked at the site and I see no evidence or mention of this capacity which would be a pretty big step so you'd think they would let you know.

Here, look at my explanation of the differences in a similar thread:
http://forums.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,71426.msg1676119.html#msg1676119

I think Endnote is fine if all you want is minimal but competent reference management and cite-while-you-write. Zotero is a superset of Endnote if you take any kind of note taking and report generation into account.

[euro_trash]

Minimal - HA!  Good luck with zotero. 

[niceday]

Eurotrash and Endnote sitting on a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G

:-)

Still, would love a link explaining that Endnote finally started allowing for multiple notes per citation, to be tagged separately. Genuinely want to know as I usually tell people it does not and would like to be correct.

[bookishone]

marigolds, doesn't Sente allow for multiple notes per entry now? I thought I saw an update recently that mentioned this.

I don't know about tags. My experience with Endnote over (!) nearly 20 years is that my assigned keywords change as my research area and experience change, and I can't be counted on to reliably remember each of half a dozen relevant tags for any one text. Fulltext search of the note has to be the next best thing, unless someone develops a tagging mechanism that pulls up a dialogue box with ALL my tags, arranged by category, and I can just control-click on the ones I need. Then I'd be much less likely to forget to type in "British" or whatever, and thus less likely to miss that one crucial reference the next time I search.

And AFAIK, Endnote still has one big (up to 12 pp) note per source.

[niceday]

marigolds, doesn't Sente allow for multiple notes per entry now? I thought I saw an update recently that mentioned this.

I don't know about tags. My experience with Endnote over (!) nearly 20 years is that my assigned keywords change as my research area and experience change, and I can't be counted on to reliably remember each of half a dozen relevant tags for any one text. Fulltext search of the note has to be the next best thing, unless someone develops a tagging mechanism that pulls up a dialogue box with ALL my tags, arranged by category, and I can just control-click on the ones I need. Then I'd be much less likely to forget to type in "British" or whatever, and thus less likely to miss that one crucial reference the next time I search.

And AFAIK, Endnote still has one big (up to 12 pp) note per source.

Zotero, of course, does full text search and does it very well. Best part is that since Zotero doesn't cram you to one big note per source like Endnote does (I'm convinced that Euro_trash is blinded by his love for Endnote and is not factually correct), the full-text search is useful. If I do a search for all notes that contain the word "basketweaving" and "injuries", I only get those notes instead of all the combined notes from any source where there is any mention.

Think about it -- if you have 10 pages of notes per book, Endnote gives you no way to access them at any finer level. It's all or nothing. With Zotero, you can categorize those 10 pages in as many notes as you want, tag or describe them or link them to other sources *all individually*. So, Zotero lets you have as many index cards per source as you want while Endnote gives you one huge piece of paper and says write it all here.

Of course, you can also see them all together in one big batch if you want. Endnote only lets you do the latter. As usual, subset of Zotero capabilities.

Also, you can see all your tags and click on them to get all associated notes in Zotero. I don't know if they let you categorize the tags as well. For that, I would recommend using the collection capability which works somewhat like an outliner so you get a hierarchical view (tags are a random access view).

[87735501111]

This discussion has turned to arguing about two different sets of tasks - indexed notes and reference management. Personally, I like to keep those as two different tasks to avoid confusion. I think Endnote works great for holding many references and creating the bibliography, however, I don't rely on it for doing everything.

When I am working on research notes, I now use OneNote, due to the low cost and intuitive structure. But I don't see that this has to necessarily be the same program as my reference manager. I am pretty sure that you can cross index different pages -- have played with it a few times, although stopped because it doesn't seem particularly intuitive to me as a task.

I tried Zotero twice a couple years ago, but didn't like it. Possibly this relates to the fact that I'm not always online. I like the PDF holding and organizing abilities of Mendeley, although it could be better. Annotation ability is pretty good. I would never use it for bibliographic reference management though. (Also, don't get me started on the stupid auto-pull of PDF information -- I have a lot of scanned chapters and would really prefer to have that option turned off sometimes, because it's just more work to fix the garbage citation it generates with these.) 

[testingthewaters]

I'm another EndNote fan, though I don't use it for the complex note taking stuff that some of you did. I wish I still had access to it, but my uni gave up the license to it last year.

My uni has decided to switch to RefWorks, which completely and utterly sucks in all imaginable ways. Just to mention it, in case you should ever consider RefWorks- don't do it.

[merce]

This discussion has turned to arguing about two different sets of tasks - indexed notes and reference management. Personally, I like to keep those as two different tasks to avoid confusion....

Apparently so do the people who make these things.
But that´s just the problem. At least to me. I dont understand the point of the bibliography thingy without notetaking capabilities. And if it doesn´t keep source info well then how would the notes be useful if I don´t know where they came from?

Maybe the notetaking things work fine for holding the source info tied to each note and what I should do is get that and leave off the zotero.

[euro_trash]

Euro_trash is blinded by his love for Endnote

Touché

[rvdparis]

Sente does allow multiple notes per reference (@bookishone), each note also corresponds to its page number when you are highlighting a PDF file: You highlight a passage in PDF, make it a quote, the quote appears in its own field, automatic page number, you can title the quote, you can comment on the quote in a separate field, and you can export your notes. http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/Products.html  A mac app with an iPad app that syncs.

Look out for Papers coming out with a new version next week: http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/2.0/  Looks like they will finally be supporting in text citations!  A mac app with an iPad app that syncs.

And then there's the German Citavi...which is really excellent and made for academics...version 3 is finally in English, and while it's windows only, they are working on a mac version.  What's great is that it actually MANAGES your references as if it were a project (it is a reference management program); you can assign tasks, for example, to references.  You can also take multiple notes per reference, and it also has--what other apps lack--an outline manager, where you can insert references to make an outline.  It is a fascinating (and not very expensive) application worth looking into.  http://www.citavi.com/

best, Rich

[87735501111]

But that´s just the problem. At least to me. I dont understand the point of the bibliography thingy without notetaking capabilities. And if it doesn´t keep source info well then how would the notes be useful if I don´t know where they came from?

Maybe the notetaking things work fine for holding the source info tied to each note and what I should do is get that and leave off the zotero.

Well, some people might put bananas on a peanut butter sandwich, and while that's all well and good for them, I don't like to mix those two things either, even though I might eat them together in a snack. That's just different preferences...

When I'm doing reading summaries, notes and diagrams in onenote, I just do the common in text citation (author, year, page) for myself and turn those things into real citations (as in via endnote in word) later when I'm actually writing up. It's easy enough for me to pull the correct reference from endnote with just that information. Sure, it would be nice to get in-line citations when still working in onenote, to save me some work when writing, but it's not a big deal at the pre-writing and research stage...

The good thing about Endnote is that once you're up to speed on how to reformat references, you can do a lot of customization automatically, so it's very easy to reformat a bibliography/citation style to, for example, prepare an article for submission to a different journal.

[merce]

...
When I'm doing reading summaries, notes and diagrams in onenote, I just do the common in text citation (author, year, page) for myself and turn those things into real citations (as in via endnote in word) later when I'm actually writing up. It's easy enough for me to pull the correct reference from endnote with just that information. Sure, it would be nice to get in-line citations when still working in onenote, to save me some work when writing, but it's not a big deal at the pre-writing and research stage... ...

But if you have notes from 20 years ago, let's say you have 32,000 notes. And you can do a search through them for all notes that discuss primates/power/&color then when you find the 400 notes that discuss those certainly it's necessary to know where the quote of the note came from? Otherwise it's useless?
So it seems like it is a big deal at the research stage.

I'm wanting something for the research stage -- that is the conclusion I'm coming to after looking at numerous threads which has been very helpful.

Sente does allow multiple notes per reference (@bookishone), each note also corresponds to its page number when you are highlighting a PDF file: You highlight a passage in PDF, make it a quote, the quote appears in its own field, automatic page number, you can title the quote, you can comment on the quote in a separate field, and you can export your notes. http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/Products.html  A mac app with an iPad app that syncs.

Look out for Papers coming out with a new version next week: http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/2.0/  Looks like they will finally be supporting in text citations!  A mac app with an iPad app that syncs.

And then there's the German Citavi...which is really excellent and made for academics...version 3 is finally in English, and while it's windows only, they are working on a mac version.  What's great is that it actually MANAGES your references as if it were a project (it is a reference management program); you can assign tasks, for example, to references.  You can also take multiple notes per reference, and it also has--what other apps lack--an outline manager, where you can insert references to make an outline.  It is a fascinating (and not very expensive) application worth looking into.  http://www.citavi.com/

best, Rich

Ok, Sente can search through the 32,000 notes to find the appropriate 400 BUT it won't pull up the 400 for you. It pulls up the citation and every daggum note for those citations. So, instead of 400 potentially useful quotes, you have to wade through 4,000 of which only 400 are potentially useful.
Stupid. Otherwise I liked Sente.
Without separating out the notes it is completely useless to me.

It sounds like citavi may do what I want. Organize the notes (hopefully with citation info somehow attached so I know where each note/quote came from).
Phew. Now all I have to do is wait til it's on mac. :-/

[87735501111]

Hm... I think what you're talking about is effectively a form of content analysis, and people typically use expensive dedicated software for this type of large-scale text analysis. I've used NVivo for this, with a keyword or code summary for all instances of XYZ. But one still has to manually add the appropriate code if the particular segment implies a concept, but doesn't include the specific keyword that you might be searching with. (nvivo is also quite expensive, and makes using Endnote trivial in terms of usability.) I've seen some papers that used Qualrus for this, which might be better, but I haven't used this myself.

Onenote does something similar with search results bringing up some surrounding text, and a hyperlink to click to the appropriate page. So if you title each note appropriately (eg. interviewee, date), then you can quickly tell how many instances you're getting and from which notes, but it doesn't save this search in the same fashion as nvivo. But it is like 1/10 the cost too. -- oh, but I diverge - the way I can tell the source of each note is because I am either titling the pages appropriately, or because I add a data source field after the quote/paraphrase. It's not like I would automatically know where a note is coming from-- it's a manual practice that I do when writing. (However, this can happen automatically if importing appropriately titled PDFs, whether in nvivo etc. or in onenote, but again, you'd have to recopy the reference.)

I still stand by the fact that I can index back to the appropriate reference by adding an inline citation (author, year, page), but that's because the task I'm mainly talking about is the literature review, with academic papers and books -- I would agree that if you're working on large scale content analysis, or if you have less standard archival materials or webpages, then you probably want another solution, or you need to be careful about your data management practices (file naming, etc.)...

Well, perhaps we're talking across one another, because to me, content analysis is not the same thing as bibliographic reference management...

[niceday]

Merce, have you actually tried Zotero? I keep running into you in these threads over the years but not sure if you are actually trying out the software -- or are you holding out for The Perfect Software and not using any of them?

As far as I can tell, Zotero does exactly what you want, more or less exactly the way you describe it. It lets you organizes the notes, at the note level, with citation info attached. It generates reports. It has cite-while-you-write if that is important to you. It's free. Not sure what else you need?

[janewales]

Is Zotero still Firefox or Chrome only?