Footnotes?

Posted by Tom Colvin
Jul 18, 2007 at 01:33 PM

I’ve been intensely searching for and evaluating bibliographic and note-taking software to help me with a huge research project and eventual book. [While I trained centuries ago as a historian, this is the first time in decades that I’ve been confronted with rigorous documentation/footnoting requirements].

I agree with Matt that BIBLIOSCAPE is emerging as the strongest program of its type. I’ve recently downloaded version 7.0.1 and successfully imported my database from Citation 9 [which I’ve given up]. Version 7 does bring together in one place a reference database and note-taking capability. I really like what I see. However, the software still has bugs. A good many people who have upgraded from version 6 are reporting problems. And I’ve even encountered some problems with organizing my notes into an outline. Developer Paul Chen is very responsive and is working hard at bug fixes—he’s already up to version 7.4. He wrote me that he hopes to have the outlining problems fixed in version 7.5, which he hopes to make available soon.

ENDNOTE remains the industry standard, but I think it’s position will be severely challenged by BIBLIOSCAPE 7. ENDNOTE has a very clean interface, and everyone is more or less required to allow data conversion to ENDNOTE format. However, it’s note-taking capability is limited.

For what it’s worth, I’m writing in Word, each chapter in a separate file, using the Chapter-by-Chapter add-on to manage all the separate chapters. When I need to footnote, I jump to the end of the document, where I am accumulating my footnotes as part of the text, rather than utilizing Word’s footnote facility. There I copy and paste a few words from the text whict I need to document, then boldface those words. Then I turn to BIBLIOSCAPE, which easly presents me with a properly formatted citation for the source, to which I add the page number. This system of footnoting is beginning to spread, especially among writers aiming at a popular market.