A Lot of Buzz about ConnectedText, but what about Mac users?

Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 1, 2013 at 09:18 PM

Nhaps wrote:
>I’m
>wondering if CT Preferences can choose a reference manager of choice, so
>Control +Y can be used for automatic citing

I don’t think so. You could paste in the citation code from your reference manager into a CT topic as you’re writing, and then, once you’ve exported the CT text, have the codes recognised by your reference manager add-in in whatever word processor you’re using, but it sounds like too much hassle to me.

>I am more interested in knowing whether python within CT
>could generate citation styles that can be used to format footnotes and
>bibliography in the future.

I presume it would be possible if you’re really good at Python, but again it sounds like too much trouble, if you already have a perfectly functioning reference manager. I prefer to do the referencing and formatting of bibliographies in a word processor, as the very last step, not as part of the outlining and organising.

>Although I heard CT is not for final
>polishing.

That’s right, you’d be better off using a word processor for that.

>My bottleneck is the lack of outline capability in Scrivener plus the
>lack of ease for wiki/link creation throughout the document.
>The concept of an outline “within” an outline is a killer feature, with
>the option to link part of a second outline to the project outline (or
>in its entirety for that matter) references

I’m getting the impression that you’re talking about outlining both as the earlier phase of organising and analysis of material, and the final phase of writing reports out of the organised material.

Personally I use CT for the former, but not for the latter. I’d say Scrivener is more geared towards the latter, than the former. But the two could be used in conjunction (organising tool + writing tool).

I’m sceptical about using a single tool for the entire academic research process from beginning to end, as there is always some specialised tool that is better at doing certain bits of the workflow than an “all-in-one” tool.