Horses for courses: Voodoopad, Tinderbox, Curio, Devonthink, etc

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 3, 2013 at 11:33 PM

Prion wrote:
>I guess, the one thing I haven’t quite decided on yet is where
>ultimately every piece of information is to be found in my system, the
>hub of my note-taking universe if you will. Right now, there are several
>locations I need to search, not-so-trusted systems living side by side
>on my computer. One way to simplify for me was to abandon taking notes
>about research papers inside my reference management program itself.

I don’t use a Mac, so I can’t help on that front. But in terms of having everything (important) in one place, I think that can be achieved now, though it takes 1) the right software, 2) the right workflow, and then 3) discipline to stick with 1 & 2. In this regard I would suggest that a wiki can serve as such a system. It has two benefits for academics: 1) it can serve as your slip box (index card, Zettelkasten) for notes, quotes (basically everything essential), and 2) it can provide links to pretty much everything else that can’t be imported for whatever reason.

Also, sometimes there are good reasons not to put everything into the same database. I keep all my academic etc. notes in ConnectedText, but I keep my academic journal PDFs in EndNote. I only link to those PDFs from CT that are truly relevant. So there is a virtual filter set up (in my mind), to separate the wheat from the chaff. For the same reason, I keep webpages in Surfulater, rather than in CT. I can link directly from CT to a Surfulater item, if necessary.

My main principle though is to bring everything important into CT in text form. For this reason I don’t keep notes in my bibliographic manager (EndNote). Those notes would be important and there is not much one can do with them in EndNote, while in CT they can be linked, categorised, and found in searches. Similarly, although I read journal articles in PDF form, eventually I import selected quotes and annotations into CT. The point is to avoid duplication of effort. I found out the hard way that poor note-taking (keeping them in the PDFs or handwritten in books) results in having to do the work again…