#Using docear with zotero update
#Using docear with zotero free

On a different plane, I use presentation tools a lot, especially PowerPoint and now, mostly, Prezi.

So there’ll be no ‘literature and latte’ for me. I have experimented with using FreePlane to map out an article-length piece of writing in skeleton form, and found it to work well. It does not handle or integrate the referencing process. It’s all the rage these days, and I was tempted to take the bait, but it doesn’t do one very critical thing for academic writing.

It is also possible to graphically map your writing process, and Scrivener famously allows writers to do this, including corkboarding the plot of a novel and moving units of writing around.

I’m simply copying and pasting Zotero references one by one into FreePlane and manipulating them from there as needed. That kind of lost time is hard to replace. But…I haven’t found it always easy to use, hitting roadblocks at times that I can’t find a way around. It handles references internally and readily maps them. Again, a great idea, and I’ve toyed with it, not to replace Zotero but as a next step. It is a program that combines FreePlane and a reference manager called JabRef.

I tend instead to use the simpler mindmapping program FreePlane in many cases. VUE is very powerful, though I have not always found the instructions attached easy to understand. What a great idea, to mindmap your references! One edition of Zotero was blessed with a user-written add-on (the kind of thing you get with such open-source software) that rendered one’s Zotero references in a fantastic concept mapper called VUE, or Visual Understanding Environment, put out by TUFTS University. While we’re talking about Zotero, I gave a good go to a program meant to combine the functions of a citation manager and a mindmap.But if I was a student starting out, I’d give it a serious look, especially now that it’s serious for student.

I can’t start from the beginning again, and don’t really feel the need to. But as Darth Vader said, “It’s too late for me, son.” I’m familiar with MS Word and find it quite powerful and effective, though it isn’t “the latest thing to come across the wire.” And I’ve invested heavily, first in EndNote, and now even more in Zotero. To combine these functions makes all the sense in the world to me. (EndNote is more powerful in some ways, but on balance Zotero is more useful for me.) Now there is an Aussie startup called ComWriter that handles both word processing and the citing of sources. Zotero is a reference (or citation) manager that I have found more versatile than EndNote, particularly in its ability to cater well for notetaking, linking of references to each other, and instant harvesting of references from web pages such as lists of books on Amazon. Sometimes such double-duty tools have worked for me, others not, and others I haven’t really tried. I thought I’d talk about this in terms of some that are meant to act as in-between tools that combine functions done singly by others.

#Using docear with zotero update

Just an update on my experiments with software tools for study and research purposes.

#Using docear with zotero free

In a word, Endnote has more power under the hood for large library management and mass-editing, and offers a lot more free space online, while Zotero is more user-friendly and versatile, with better notetaking, tabbing and linking of records, and of course, it’s free, even when you’re not a student. Zotero, two of the most popular reference managers.

One point of interest in the prezi is a comparison of the relative advantages of Endnote v. Some other interesting ones include Mendeley, ReadCube, and Docear, which combines reference management and writing with a mindmapping function, though it isn’t easy to learn, in my opinion. The three resources treated here are those that feature our in-house citation style.

You’ll have to forgive the minority of instructions that are specific to our institution here in Australia, Melbourne School of Theology (MST), along with its parent accrediting body, the Australian College of Theology. Following up from the previous post, which offered a link to a prezi on (postgraduate, and primarily text-oriented) research workflow, with a digital tool emphasis, here is a similar link to a prezi that compares Endnote and Zotero in particular, and notes the existence of an integrated word processor and reference manager tool called Comwriter.