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[eigen]

I'm still trying to find the workflow (programs, processes, etc) that work best for me, and I was hoping that some of the wise and experienced forumites out there might have some good ideas.

Currently, I'm using Endnote for all my citations, and word for document fragments, reviews of papers, etc. I've also got Adobe Pro, which I use to annotate the actual PDFs prior to an actual short written review.

For actual research notes, I've got the obligatory lab notebooks, as well as some virtual notebooks in MS Onenote, and once I hit reasonable points I go ahead and write up short "progress reports".

I'm about halfway through a switch from Windows->Mac (laptop is a Mac, desktop is a PC), and I realize that this opens me up to a range of new programs for writing and managing references, reserach, etc. Scrivener in particular looks quite interesting, especially for writing up short fragments/reviews and holding on to them for when I need to compile longer documents.

So, what is your research workflow and what do you use to keep everything organized and manageable?

[bwwm1]

I use Papers. I find it the easiest way to organize lots of sources in many projects. It's ok for note-taking too.

[chroniclrr]

Mine is a bit of scattered which is not ideal but here it goes:
MS One note for doing and saving research etc
MS excel for storing various links in a table along with info
Word for writing of course.
Designer,
http://www.trademeters.com/ POS Software TradeMeters

[egilson]

I use Zotero for bibliographic management and note-taking. Notes include quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and my own thoughts as I'm reading that I want to include in whatever I'm writing, but since it's Zotero it could include images or other things as well. I put these things in their own Zotero collection so that I can search them easily.

Once I'm done taking notes, I run a report of that collection from Zotero that is formatted to display the item title and notes only. I then drop that report into Excel and add a left column with running numbers. This produces a file with a unique number in the left column for each note item, the work title in the middle column, and the noted material in the right. I print that report and go through it with a pencil, checking off those items I want to include and adding additional notes as needed. (Since I've had over 600 notes for one chapter, this takes a bit of time.)

I then produce the outline for the work in Word and add the item numbers I want to include to each line in the outline. As I write, I check those numbers off as I come to them and add their item, use arrows or re-write numbers to move them to other places in the outline, or scratch them out altogether. Because I'm pretty familiar with the material by this point in the process, I will also go back and pull in material I had initially rejected. I use Zotero's Word integration to add citations as I write, and I copy both body text and quotations either by hand from the printed Excel file or by copying and pasting from the spreadsheet file - whichever is easiest at the moment.

At the end of the process, I have my draft, my scribbled-up outline, my Excel printout, the Excel file, and the Zotero collection. I'm saving all of this right now, thinking it might be of some use someday.

[prof_cj]

I'm pretty bare-bones;

I have a Google Docs page open to throw URL's I come across for research that I want to save, Notepad for rough notetaking while doing online research @ the computer, for transcribing physical notes from meatspace research (out of a notebook), and then it all gets formalized into an MS Word document.

[marigolds]

I'm Sente + Scrivener.

Mostly posting here to get updates on what others do.

[eigen]

I'm still trying to get used to Scrivener. I like it, but it's very different from what I'm used to, and I get the feeling there are a lot of powerful and useful features that I haven't really figured out how to use yet.

[marigolds]

I'm still trying to get used to Scrivener. I like it, but it's very different from what I'm used to, and I get the feeling there are a lot of powerful and useful features that I haven't really figured out how to use yet.

It's worth the time to watch some of the tutorial videos on Youtube--esp for things like collections. And there's a lot of good best-practices information on the forums at literatureandlatte.

[eigen]

I've read through some of the forums, and I took the time to run through the entirety of their in-program tutorial- it was just so much information, that I'm working through how exactly to work the new stuff into my flow.

[synecdoche]

I use Scrivener and Endnote. Just about everything happens in Scrivener up until the point where I assemble a draft. I take notes in Scrivener, do rough writing in Scrivener, do free writing in Scrivener. Endnote just does the bibliography, and I pretty much cling to it only because I paid for it once upon a time and can't let go.

In Scrivener, I have a few folders set up: the default draft folder, a research folder (sub-divided into "Primary" and "Secondary" folders, in which I drop PDFs and other documents), a notes folder, and a "scrivenings" folder. Each source gets its own file in the notes folder, which includes the bibliographical information on the "notecard" and at the top of the document, because redundancy is good. The scrivenings folder is where I do most of my initial writing, jot down ideas, keep a "to-read" list, a working bibliography, and so on.

When ideas start to coalesce, I move my writing to the draft folder. I usually try to organize the drafts folder in a outline form, wherein each section of my chapter or essay gets its own folder, and each paragraph gets its own text file that I can then move around on the cork board. When I have what is starting to look like a complete essay, I then print it out and use that hard copy to start writing the actual first draft in my word processor. Re-writing helps me rephrase and revise and identify problem areas.

Note, too, that each chapter / article / conference paper gets its own Scrivener file. I keep them separate (though I may copy and paste certain files from one project to another). When I was writing my dissertation, everything was separate right up until just before I submitted and I put it all together in my word processor (which happens to be Nisus Writer Pro). This was relatively painless as I am pretty meticulous with the styles and the template I use.