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Bookends or DTP as center of workflow?

Hello, new member here. :-)

I'm currently saving my pennies for a replacement mac laptop, and am also plotting for a good academic research workflow.

My pencil and paper understanding of workflow is: read document, mark it up, reread, make notecards. (I'll ignore actually producing a paper for now.)

"Everyone" says DTP (especially with OCR) is wonderful. But I'm stuck trying to envision how to do notecards. Bookends allows you to associate any sort of file with a bibliographic record. The original PDF and any RTF or TXT "notecard" files you wrote yourself.

DTP does not allow you to link materials with a bibliographic record(?). But I think putting my "notecards" with single thoughts and small excerpts (as well as full PDFs) into DTP will help me write papers better, especially over time.

Or should I associate the notes with Bookends, and just link to them from DTP, instead of creating them within DTP?

Obviously I'm fishing for workflow suggestions here. I just want a great notetaking and organization method that ties into Bibliographic info.

Thanks,
Phil

TOPICS: Mac OS X
terceiro's picture

I don't put anything in...

I don't put anything in Bookends except the standard information and the linked file. I don't add any notes except, I suppose, a note about when I used the paper in the past, as in "Used for e980 paper: Winter 2007."

I've messed around with various systems for taking reading notes over the past couple of years, since I began grad school. My best practices for now are to take notes on paper, probably. I use a composition/lab book for my research, and write them down there. It introduces the fewest complications to my reading, and keeps me focused longer.

I later take those notes (and any passages I've marked in the text) and copy them into DEVONthink. Since I hate writing in DEVONthink, I'll probably actually be typing either in TextMate or VoodooPad, but the notes will always wind up in DEVONthink.

Each note has the full bibliographic citation (copied from Bookends) in the first few lines. I'll just keep it on the clipboard and copy it onto the head of each new DT document. Each idea, note, or quotation gets its own document.

 
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