myBase Desktop v6 released

Posted by Glen Coulthard
Sep 15, 2011 at 10:56 PM

Hi Alexander,

To be honest, I also use academic software for writing formal papers and for collecting articles relevant to my current/ongoing research. However, I don’t typically use this software when trolling for web content or for storing/managing personal information. Specifically, I use:

- Atlas.ti for qualitative coding of Word documents and OCRed PDFs; I prefer Atlas.ti over NVivo (even though NVivo has a sexier interface)
- Biblioscape for reference management and quotation gathering; although some of my work is still in EndNote
- PDF Annotator for marking up PDFs (but really I use this program for grading student papers more than making my own annotations.)

As selecting a biblography and reference manager, EndNote has always lacked PDF annotation and note-taking capabilities (beyond rudimentary mark-up). IdeaMason was a great concept, but it seemed like simple tasks always took 3 or 4 steps (or screens) to complete. Currently, I am evaluating Citavi, which is a Dutch?/German? software that seems to be a better/cleaner implementation of IdeaMason functionality. And, lastly, I have tried using the free version of Mendeley, but prefer Biblioscape’s richer handling of PDF, RTF, and note-generation capabilities.

Once my “collecting/gathering/annotating/processing” phase is complete, I then move to MyNotesKeeper to layout my article or ConnectedText to organize the information snippets.

Have you used any academic software that you prefer?

—Glen

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Glen,
> >A question only partly linked to MyBase: I’m surprised that as an academic you
>have not turned to more specialised software which would support footnotes and the
>like. Have you tried them and been turned off in terms of complexity, or lacking in
>useful features?
>