Jenny Mackness<\/a>, who generously shared with me the tools she uses (and how she uses them) in writing research articles, including PBworks, Word, Mendeley, and Evernote.<\/p>\nIt was only as I investigated and tried these, thinking about her workflow and constantly reminding myself what task(s) I was trying to accomplish, that I realized something about doing research in the information age (or whatever the hell we\u2019ll call this).<\/p>\n
What we used to need to write research papers was:<\/p>\n
1. bibliography cards for recording references (3 x 5)
\n2. note cards for recording one idea\/note\/quotation each (4 x 6)
\n3. notepads for outlining and brainstorming
\n4. more notepads for composition
\n5. typewriter\/electronic typewriter\/word processor\/word-processing program on computer for formatting and final copy<\/p>\n
Turns out the process hasn\u2019t changed, just the technology. I think I\u2019m going with:<\/p>\n
1. Paperpile for bibliography
\nI\u2019ve actually paid for this, and I rarely pay for anything. It\u2019s a database where you either enter the bibliographic information or it figures it out from an uploaded PDF (which it actually uploads to Google Drive, not itself). You can annotate the PDF files and add notes to them, but I\u2019ve found this only works well for recent articles. I\u2019m using a lot of stuff from the 1880s, and those PDFs don\u2019t do so well because the program does not OCR. The annotations and notes export, but not in a usable way. So I have quite a few articles where I likely won\u2019t use the notes, but the highlighting is helpful. The best thing is that it integrates for footnoes in Google Docs. The other best thing is that it outputs bibliographies with multiple citation formats.<\/p>\n
2. Google Keep for notecards
\nI\u2019ve gone round and round on this, looking for something that tiles notecards on the screen, and makes them searchable. I tried Evernote again, and still don\u2019t get how to see all the info at once. The main issue is integration between the notes and whatever program I use for composition. I looked at several other programs also, desperate to not go with Google. I know it\u2019s likely Google Keep will disappear, since it\u2019s \u201cbelow the fold\u201d on the Google menu, so this decision was influenced by #4, below.<\/p>\n
3. PBworks for outlining
\nJenny taught me that the old Peanut Butter Wiki is still around and handy. Here I can put research notes (not content, but process), library holdings lists, plans for articles, basic outlines, links to all the Google Docs (including the pdfs being used by Paperpile) and other stuff online that I might need.<\/p>\n
4. Google Docs for composition
\nIt\u2019s the equivalent of those legal pads (I actually used letter-sized lined glued pads, and still do). Because of its integration with Paperpile, and the ease of writing from any of my four (!) computers, it\u2019s the logical choice.<\/p>\n
5. Word for formatting
\nIt seems so bizarre that computing hasn\u2019t saved a single step in the old research process, but it hasn\u2019t. Word is crap at all the other processes here except composition, but I\u2019d have to go all Microsoft to get another suite together, and, frankly, they wanted my cell phone number to give me that with OneNote and OneDrive (no). Several journals and conferences want submissions in .docx, and I\u2019ve been using Word since before version 5.1a for Mac (the best version ever). Now if I could just get those citations from Paperpile to come through Google Docs in black instead of gray\u2026.<\/p>\n
The biggest challenge will be backup (for the work, not for me, although that would be nice). PBworks is best at this – you can back up (export) the whole wiki in html with two clicks. Google, of course, does not want you backing up to your hard drive – it wants you cloud-dependent. So remembering to back up composition Docs as I go is a thing, but I managed it on my recent presentation so I think I can do it. Google Keep backup is awkward at best – you basically have to put them in a Doc and export to get anything usable. But at least a Doc can be exported as plain text.<\/p>\n
So, now to work\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yet another post recording a workflow so that I don\u2019t forget what I decided to do! This time I\u2019ve had serious help from my brilliant friend and colleague Jenny Mackness, who generously shared with me the tools she uses (and how she uses them) in writing research articles, including PBworks, Word, Mendeley, and Evernote. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,4,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wells-project","category-history","category-educational-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}