Workflow on Mac (Mountain Lion) for PhD Thesis

Posted by jamesofford
Aug 13, 2012 at 01:42 PM

Peter:
It’s been many years since I wrote my dissertation. So many that none of the programs that you mention were available. I suspect that the people who wrote them may not even have been born when I was in Grad School. Indeed, I was one of the first people in my department to write my dissertation on a computer. I used Microsoft Word. Not the Windows version or the Mac version-the DOS version.
However, I have stayed in the business since then. First as a Post-Doc, and then as a researcher at a pharmaceutical company. Now I am back in academia.
In each of those different jobs I have had a similar set of tasks to the ones that you have. Assemble information. Put it someplace I can find it when I need it. Come up with a way to write about it. Come up with a convenient way to cite it when I write. This is an unending set of tasks that will always be there.
You will probably find that any system that you come up with is unique to you. Try a few things. If they help, keep using them. If they don’t, dump them. Don’t worry about what has worked for someone else. We all think and work differently. That being said, it is always good to have someone say “I tried program X and it worked to do Y.” If you need to do Y, then give it a try. But just because someone else found it useful, that doesn’t mean that you will. You found your way to a good place here. The people here have tried a lot of different things and write about them. Good place to find stuff to use.
What I have found works for me is four things. Devonthink Pro Office. Papers. Evernote. Endnote.
I use Devonthink for keeping a lot of the junk that I accumulate in a kind of order. I have a series of folders that Devonthink watches over and from which it sucks files. I have sets of smart collections and sets of manual collections that things get put into as well as some databases that just have stuff in it. Papers is invaluable to me for dealing with PDFs. Up until version 2 it wasn’t that useful. Now it does most of the things I need. Highly recommended. Evernote is what I use for sharing stuff that I find with others. I could use Devonthink for this, but Evernote is easier and cross-platform. Finally Endnote. I don’t really like Endnote, but it is the standard when it comes to sharing bibliographies and when you are writing.
Oh, I should also add, I use a Mac. Not that I have any sort of dislike of Windows machines. The software above runs on Macs, so I use a Mac. Also, I do my first drafts with pen and paper, then move them to the computer.
Finally a comment about writing-Just write. I found that the hardest part of the dissertation was simply sitting down and entering the words. I’ll leave you with a quote from E. L. Doctorow: Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

Good luck.
Jim