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Grad Students Represent: Note Taking / References on OS X

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

TOPICS: Mac OS X
Todd V's picture

re: Bookends & Nisus Writer

I agree with Craig that Bookends from sonnysoftware is a much better and more user-friendly approach to handling all of your articles and books. You can even make special "smart lists" for your references to keep everything organized. It makes quick bibliographies and searching for new books and articles to import into your database is really easy to do. It also formats based on Turabian, APA, MLA, or whatever other formatting you might need.

On the Word Processor front I would tentatively, but enthusiastically recommend Nisus Writer Express. They bit the bullet and decided to recode from scratch the entire thing in Cocoa when OS X first came out. Now that's true devotion! While it still needs some more work to compete with some of the mainline word processors, nothing can beat its find-replace capabilities, it's multi-lingual features (if you work with more than one language), and programmer-savvy macros. So far it works very well for basic word-processing functionality and already has macros that work with the Bookends program.

Todd V

 
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