Footnotes?

Posted by Matty
Jul 17, 2007 at 03:12 PM

JG wrote:
>I have been looking for exactly this feature for some time now, as well as a
>bibliographical listing of the citations. There is a distinction to be made between
>software that manipulates data (i.e. particular times or dates) and one that
>manipulates text (i.e. paragraphs or pages). The latter often requires the author to
>keep track of her or his sources. Netmanage’s Ecco Pro is the best compromise I have
>found, but no citation component. IdeaMason works, but slowly. I have been using
>ndxCards for smaller projects. The citation output is rather limited, and the
>program has several quirks. But it works well enough, again for smaller projects. I
>have endnote only because my school provides it but it doesn’t allow the kind of text
>manipulation I want in an outliner. What I lust for is a form of PCoutline or Grandview
>that has a bibliographical component. I haven’t round anything like that yet.

To my mind, there is nothing yet adequately does what we are talking about. I am a historian, therefore citations and footnotes are central to my work. What I do is keep all my references in biblioscape. When I take notes, or have an idea, related to a specific reference, I write it in whizfolders, then tag it with one or more temporary citations from biblioscape. Now I can use Whizfolders to do what outliners do best: organize my ideas/research into a coherent structure. Truth is, however, I transport my writing into MS word earlier than I might otherwise because of the ability to create footnotes. BTW, biblioscape will then transform all of my temporary citations into formatted citations in any style I choose. I have done a fair amount of research, and biblioscape appears to me to be by far the most sophisticated reference management tool. I still have not switched over to v.7 for my work…well… because I’m lazy and comfortable with v.6, but I think people should keep an eye on the continued development of the program. It is already a great reference management program, and the developer is working hard to make it a very good note management program as well. I don’t think it will ever take the place of a true outliner, but as a primary repository for research I think it will soon be very good. The benefits of having reference management and notes management in the same program should be obvious.

P.S. I did try Idea Mason. Its nifty, seems promising, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. Too, hermetic I think. Even if it was lightening fast, which it isn’t, it didn’t allow for as easy back and forth movement of information between itself and ms word, which is crucial to my work process.

Matt