Advice on research software

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 17, 2013 at 04:25 PM

Hi Wayne,

I’ve had experience of designing databases using both relational databases (like Access, which is certainly NOT free-form), and genuinely free-form databases (like Blackwell Idealist and, to a lesser extent, FileMaker, which comes into a category of its own for reasons I will explain).

You certainly could organise your research notes using a relational database like Access - as long as you know what you’re trying to achieve. At first glance, working methodology and draft structure you describe are compatible with a modern relational database, provided you know precisely what kinds of reports you’re going to want to generate.

However, be aware that configuring the database (or rather, multiple databases/data tables) to your requirements will be a fairly lengthy and potentially complex process. Furthermore, relational databases aren’t really optimal for searching through large quantities of text (although they’re great for assembling specific chunks of data according to specific output schemes). It all depends - as I’ve already said - on precisely what you want to achieve with the reports.

It sounds as if something like Blackwell Idealist would be better suited to your needs. But you would also do well to investigate systems like EndNote which, although it calls itself a citation manager, is actually rather more than that (this is true of most citation management software, in fact - they have become the equivalent of bibliographical databases, one of the greatest and best of which used to be Blackwell Idealist, now, alas, defunct).

If you like to devise and control your own output schemes, however, you could take a closer look at FileMaker (which has the additional advantage of being cross-platform). Although FileMaker is a relational database, in practice it has a number of features associated with other types of database. It can handle very large amounts of text, it is capable of running searches across all fields in a record simultaneously - but also of narrowing down/expanding a given set of search results - and it has a number of idiosyncratic features like the ability to manage multiple values in a single field. I’ve used all these features in various databases I’ve built in the past, including an admin database, a linked document management system, and various terminology databases (again, linked to the admin database).

If you want to customise your own DBMS, FileMaker Pro might well be the best way to go. You can download a trial from filemaker.com

Having said that, I would indeed recommend that you read Dr. Andus’s excellent ConnectedText tutorial, just in case you decide that the precision planning and extensive development time associated with a full-scale DMBS like FM Pro is not really your cup of tea…

Cheers,
The Other Bill