Workflow on Mac (Mountain Lion) for PhD Thesis

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 12, 2012 at 10:39 PM

Peter, for what it’s worth, I use Mendeley, a free program, to manage my extensive PDF collection. It also stores them in the cloud, giving my backup redundancy to Carbonite and Dropbox, both of which contain my work documents.

Mendeley automatically adds any news PDFs OI have on my system, allows for tagging, etc.

A lot of material I acquire off the web. Non PDF goes into Evernote - which also stores my data in the cloud. EN is good for gathering material, but not much of an info manager apart from its tagging system. It does not even have highlighting of text, which for me is pretty basic. However, I work around it by colouring text which I would otherwise highlight.

From a writer’s perspective EN has one feature which for me is a deal maker - and that is that it allows me to have multiple open windows so I can scan docs I’m using for my writing.

I tried Scrivener for Windows but did not find it helpful.

My writing is either in EN, or in MyInfo, which provides me with columns for metadata, etc. MI also allows for multiple open windows. Unfortunately, it only allows for editing in one.

You may wish to look at a Swiss program called Citavi, which looks after references, etc, and may be one of the best of its kind.

Daly