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Grad Students Represent: Note Taking / References on OS X

Submitted by ScottE22 on February 16, 2007 - 7:53am.

My new MacBook arrived last week. As I am beginning a doctoral program in the fall, I'm interested in knowing what others are using to (1) take notes on the Mac, and (2) start building a reference or bibliography for a dissertation.

For note taking, I have Googled up quite a few, including:

And for references/bibliography building, I have heard about Endnote.

Ultimately whatever I choose I want to be able to stick with for my entire program so I'm not worrying about compatibility issues, etc.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!!

Scott

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Thanks for the suggestions so...

Submitted by ScottE22 on February 16, 2007 - 7:50pm.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I guess I should have mentioned that this is not my first Mac -- I became a born-again Mac user shortly after OS X arrived on the scene and I used to be a school-based technology coordinator that supported a 50/50 Windows/Mac environment. Fun times...

I did, in fact, pollute my recently deceased PowerBook with MS Office and said I would do whatever it takes to avoid doing that again. I use NeoOffice (even on my Windows machine at work now -- sort of a passive protest to not being allowed to have a Mac...) for word processing, and I'm using the free trial of iWork right now hoping to bide time until iWork '07 comes out.

My concern is whether I'll be able to avoid MS Word when it comes to writing my dissertation. To be sure, it isn't the best tool, but I'm sure it's pretty much the accepted standard - especially when it comes to sending drafts back and forth to my adviser. Needless to say I don't want to start writing and be switching apps and re-learning things....