Note taking ^ 2

September 8, 2007 6:22 PM

How do I manage notes for my dissertation on a Mac?

I have been having a tough time trying to find the right tools for keeping notes. Some issues:

• I take notes from papers that i read and used to keep them organized by the particular paper. However, a particular note may have several contexts: useful_for_dissertation, theoretical, application_related, etc. So basically I want to be able to tag my notes (each note may be a line or two long at the minimum). But I want to be able to identify their source also.
• Tried keeping notes in Skim but the notes don't have much visibility or categorization.
• Tried Journler and it comes close if you make notes as individual entries and multi-tag them. I can view notes by tags but it sucks too: you only view the titles of each entry in a folder and have to click on each to see the full text.

Seems like I am asking for too much and either I would have to do a lot or be satisfied by s simple setup. But surely there are people out there who do this somehow?

posted by raheel to computers & internet (18 comments total)

I am a Masters student doing a ton of research and I use Yojimbo. It is keeping me incredibly organized. Beautiful UI and easy to use. I think they offer a student discount. I am still using the demo but I am in love.
posted by sneakin at 6:30 PM on September 8, 2007

Wondering if you have taken a look at reference management software such as Endnote or Bookends. In addition to keeping track of sources, they have note and keyword fields. Personally I have found Bookends better at letting me categorize a particular paper several different ways, but Endnote is the 800-pound gorilla in this software sector and a lot of university libraries make available Endnote filters and such that allows you to slurp entries directly from the library online catalog to your Endnote database.
posted by needled at 6:53 PM on September 8, 2007

I'm wireless at the moment so I can't give you a link, but check out Scrivener. It sounds right up your alley.
posted by zachlipton at 7:04 PM on September 8, 2007

I would use your good old fashioned spreadsheet program. I used Excel for my thesis and it was a real dream. I had columns for categories (several of these so that more than one category could be applied, but would still be sortable later), source title, article title, author name, page number, quotation, etc.

Once I had collected my information it was a two click process to sort the data so that I could easily access all of the information pertaining to each category all at once. This works just as well as any of the reference management tools I have seen, it just takes a bit of spreadsheet knowledge.

Good luck!
posted by DavidJ710 at 7:23 PM on September 8, 2007

At the moment I am using Circusponies' Notebook which was recommended to me here not long ago.

I like it alright. I am currently using it to prep for my qualifying exams, and so I haven't really explored its amazing features, but basically a notebook, complete with dividers, sections, whatever you like. Where it gets really fun are the indices. You can also add keywords and it has an alright search function.

I use it in combination with Endnote, which I am not particularly fond of, but I paid for it so by gum I'll use it. I've also played with Zotero which looks like it has a lot of potential, but I've had trouble (no doubt due to my own ineptitude with it) getting it to play nicely with my university library which is what would really put it over the top for me. However, it isn't great for notetaking (at least the way I take notes).

I've recommended the site before, but also check out the resources available through Phinished, where you'll find people have asked this and similar questions, and often received good answers (many of which will also show up here, I'm sure, but the community at phinished has been a real boon for me so I try to recommend it to other grad students regularly).
posted by synecdoche at 7:58 PM on September 8, 2007

Scivener, for sure.
posted by charmston at 8:21 PM on September 8, 2007

You may like the simplicity of Notational Velocity. Application is super tiny, and basically all you do is punch in the title for your note, and then start typing in your note. After that, if you start typing in the title field, it auotmatically starts pulling in notes that match what you're typing, or you can type a new title and enter a new note.

Also, for writing itself I recommend LyX and BibDesk (both should be an easy google away).
posted by Deathalicious at 8:25 PM on September 8, 2007

DevonThink is a heavy hitter, but if you have the hardware oomph, its AI stuff (especially concordances) is pretty impressive. Take a look at how Steven Johnson uses it.
posted by holgate at 8:42 PM on September 8, 2007

Journler is free for personal use, and Yojimbo is similar to it in many ways.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:59 PM on September 8, 2007

Whoops, nevermind.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:00 PM on September 8, 2007

Seconding DevonThink - -and spend the bucks for the "pro" version. Spend a week getting to know it and you will never work the same way again with lots of data. I wish to god this existed when I was writing my dissertation. Instead, I wrote my first research database as a Hypercard Stack, then starting developing later efforts in Filemaker. DevonThink provides a much more powerfully integrated and searchable database of a much wider array of digital sources than you could do on your own unless you are a serious database programmer. I recommend it to all my PhD advisees, and increasingly they swear by it too.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:10 PM on September 8, 2007

Some previous threads that might be of use.
posted by djgh at 9:44 PM on September 8, 2007

Zotero is easily the best software I've come across in a long while, and I'm not noted for enthusing about software. I'm unix old school so for notes I prefer a text file and the /usr/bin/grep utility, although spotlight is pretty useful. I also keep paper notebooks as well for good measure ;-)
posted by singingfish at 2:24 AM on September 9, 2007

I use Scrivener in exactly the way you describe and for me it works like a dream.
It has a split view so you can take notes directly from a PDF or archived web page into a text file.
You can view your notes as index cards, tag them (I tag with both content keywords and author-date into), move them around on a corkboard, and set up saved searches that work more or less like smart folders.
Each document has a title and can also have a synopsis, and these are what's visible when you view the documents as index cards. You don't have to write a synopsis, but doing so encourages to summarize my notes which is a helpful step in the writing process. It also lets me scan a lot of cards at a glance and see what's in them.
Finally, when you're ready to write, the writing environment is absolutely superb.
I don't store my research files themselves in Scrivener, although I think some people do to some extent. I use Bookends to manage bibliographic data and organize PDFs etc. Bookends and Scrivener work well together (you can easily enter Bookends citations in your Scrivener texts).
(I'm near the end of a doctoral dissertation and I wish I had had Scrivener since the beginning. I have used it daily for over a year now.)
posted by bluebird at 2:52 AM on September 9, 2007

Thirding DevonThink here.
posted by bonaldi at 6:36 AM on September 9, 2007

DevonThink. Absolutely.
posted by dobbs at 7:28 AM on September 9, 2007

For very powerful hypertext note-taking, take a look at Tinderbox. If your readings are in PDF form or you're willing to scan them, Yep is a useful organizing and retrieval tool. You can also do a surprising amount of this just using word-processing documents, or text files, if you organize them in folders according to the way you work (by course, topic, etc.).
posted by RogerB at 9:46 AM on September 9, 2007

The Devonthink boosters would give you a list of all the things it can do for you but there are too many to list here. Seriously powerful writing environment? Check. Awesome and customizable user interface for keeping notes and tagging? Check. But what it offers over and above the other choices is the AI functions. It thinks for you (on the lower level of finding patterns in data) more than anything else I've seen, leaving you to do the higher level thinking you need to get into for a dissertation.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:07 AM on September 10, 2007