Looking for PIM / Thesis Writing Software for the PC

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 22, 2009 at 12:40 PM

I am at the final writing stages of my MBA dissertation and I must say that for it, like for several professional projects in the past, information management software has been worth my investment; I don’t know how I could have organised my material any other way.

That said, I started with a relatively complex setup, but in the end only the essential tools survived. Nowadays, my setup is similar but simpler than Dr Andus’:

- Surfulater for gathering all relevant information; I found most journal articles in HTML form as well as PDF, so I would usually grab the HTML and link to the PDF in my hard drive.

- Brainstorm as my writing environment; I find it indispensable, as others do GrandView, but I must say that at this size and level of complexity of texts, the lack of editable outline view becomes an issue. In any case, I have found nothing better in helping me to focus on the actual writing.

Some notes on workflow:

- I used Evernote to capture material whenever I was away from my main PC; when back, if it was relevant, it would go into Surfulater.

- I built a common outline of keywords (tags) in all three programs, which I found very useful in organising the material consistently. Maintaining this structure across the programs has been the greatest hussle.

- I did purchase an academic license for Endnote when I began my studies, but ultimately I did not use it or any other bibliography manager. I learnt Harvard referencing well and find it much more convenient to keep my references (as titles) along with the rest of the material in Surfulater and Brainstorm. Both programs can sort titles for my reference list; they also support cloning, which is great for keeping references in context in more than one places.

- I find Brainstorm’s “namesakes” (the program automatically recognises identical text entries and makes clones out of them) extremely useful to maintain flow in my writing. If something is missing while writing, I can type “citation needed” and go on writing; later I will navigate ‘sideways’ (left/right arrow jumps through namesakes) through all the “citation needed” entries. I can do the same with keywords. It’s very similar to referencing stuff in a wiki, but without the markup.

- Similarly, I find some of the smart touches of Surfulater’s latest versions very useful; e.g. highlight of titles is visible in the outline, so I can mark and quickly see what material I’ve been through.

- For some time I tried UltraRecall because it could index PDFs but found it much less convenient than Surfulater for the full range of material. PDF-Xchange is great for annotating PDFs but mostly I make the annotation in the HTML version.

That’s it form my part; I’ll post one more comment in the aesthetics thread and the go back to my writing :-)