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Academic Workflow - Any Suggestion for an Application/s?
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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Oct 22, 2019 at 03:14 PM
Although only available in the Windows world, Citavi is probably the best ref manager, pdf reader, and knowledge manager on the market. Its ability to manage knowledge is unique, and could mimic effectively the research journal, while allowing information to be organized usefully. There is also a built-in task manager which allows organization of the many details and tasks implicit in academic work.
Even if someone never ends up using Citavi, its website offers Information which may be useful.
Nothing else I have seen comes close to Citavi.
Daly
Posted by Darren McDonald
Oct 22, 2019 at 03:30 PM
Hello J J Weimer,
>At one level, you will find apps such as PDFExpert and PDFPen. They
>expand the tool sets to the iPad with additional markup options. I
>believe that both have been given high regards on this forum.
>
>PDFPen -> https://smilesoftware.com/pdfpen-family/
>PDFExpert -> https://pdfexpert.com/ios
Actually, it was reading the recommendations in this forum that had me trying out PDFExpert on my iMac, MacBookAir and iPad. I now have PDFExpert as my general default PDF reader! :)
In terms of using a PDF editor in my workflow, I am after something similar to Highlights where the highlights and notes appear as text and images in a window to the side of the PDF. These notes are linked to the PDF itself and can be imported into other applications. PDFExpert and PDFPen do not have this extra window with the notes appearing as little icon images on the PDF which you have to click to read what they are.
In this regard, your suggestion of LiquidText and MarginNote seems inline with my needs. You wrote ...
>Going further, you will find apps such as LiquidText and MarginNote.
>They include their own internal options to extract the annotations to a
>side sheet and organize them for review. The downside of these two is
>that the annotations they create are not always compliant with other PDF
>editors.
>
>LiquidText -> https://www.liquidtext.net
>MarginNote -> https://www.marginnote.com
At first, I was excited by the features of these two applications. But their weakness comes from the point you raised about them not being compliant with other PDF editors. They do not to be compliant with other PDF editors as such, but I need the highlights and notes I made in the application export to another application.
In my search for an application for the iPad I came across Flexcil https://www.flexcil.com . Have you tried this application?
>
>You may find that MarginNote (or LiquidText), with their additional
>study sheet approach, will provide a framework that you can use directly
>without having to export the annotations to other apps. In this regard,
>I particularly appreciate the approach in MarginNote to be able to put
>tags on annotations.
>
I need to investigate this study sheet approach further in the applications MarginNote (both on macOS and iOS) and LiquidText (iOS only, unfortunately). I need to see if they can help bring together a lot of different quotes and notes made on different PDFs into themes and concepts.
I would be sort of following a Grounded Theory approach to the analysis of the literature. Mm ...
>Personally, I use PDFExpert to do markup that must be compliant with the
>rest of the world (e.g. when I have to markup documents that are to be
>sent to the Windows community). I also appreciate the ability in
>PDFExpert to be able to access multiple cloud services (Google Personal
>+ Google Work + Dropbox Personal + Dropbox Work + ...). I use MarginNote
>to make annotations that I want to tag for some reason or another (e.g.
>when I grade documents, I can mark tags such as “incorrect”,
>“inadequate”, or “improper” to denote different levels of mistakes). I
>do not use the collect or study aspects of MarginNote even though these
>two additional aspects are touted as the main reason for MarginNote to
>be used (markup + collect + study). I do not appreciate the limitations
>and general instabilities that MarginNote has in syncing only with
>iCloud (and have given it a low review on the App Store for this
>reason).
Tagging would be one way I could do this. I will try and find out some more.
If I have sparked your mind for other suggestions or ways of doing things, they would be most welcome! :)
Posted by mdlynam
Oct 22, 2019 at 03:32 PM
+1 on Citavi. It’s an extremely useful piece of software. I found it when working on my Ph.D and continue to use it as a knowledge management tool.
Though off-topic for the site but perhaps pertinent to your use-case, the Chromium-based Edge browser with its built-in read text aloud may be of use to read back documents. I’ve also used VoiceComputer (and Knowbrainer) with Dragon Professional to navigate on my computer and dictate.
Take care,
/mark/
Posted by Darren McDonald
Oct 22, 2019 at 03:35 PM
Hello Luhmann,
>I use Paperpile to organize PDFs, PDF Expert to highlight and annotate.
>(Although Paperpile’s built in PDF reader - in beta - is getting
>better.) I then export annotations to Dynalist for organizing and
>search.
I keep reading good things about Paperpile. How do you use Paperpile specifically?
What is your workflow in Dynalist? Would you be able to gather quotations and notes into themes to develop concepts?
Posted by Darren McDonald
Oct 22, 2019 at 03:52 PM
Hello Daly,
>Although only available in the Windows world, Citavi is probably the
>best ref manager, pdf reader, and knowledge manager on the market. Its
>ability to manage knowledge is unique, and could mimic effectively the
>research journal, while allowing information to be organized usefully.
>There is also a built-in task manager which allows organization of the
>many details and tasks implicit in academic work.
>
>Even if someone never ends up using Citavi, its website offers
>Information which may be useful.
>
>www.citavi.com
>
>Nothing else I have seen comes close to Citavi.
>
I stumbled across Citavi just last week. I was so impressed I bought Windows 10 and Parallels to try it on my Mac! I am not sure if it is the infrastructure they use on Windows, but the software runs much slower than other software in Windows. They are promising the release of a Web version rather than working on an application developed for the Mac. I hope they release a Web version soon.
I wish Apple themselves were developing tools that the academic/scholar/researcher could use. It would be interesting to see what Apple would come up with. A totally new way of approaching research and writing?