However implementing a workflow like this is most definitely a distraction activity from my thesis write-up! I’m also avoiding upgrading from 10.14 on my 2014 rMBP in the middle of the thesis, so apps like LiquidText and the latest version of Highlights are not available to me… Jeff uses BookEnds for example, so I really ought to go back and look at this when I give BookEnds a proper workout. It involves a lot of moving parts but one doesn’t necessarily need all of it, depending on one’s specific requirements.
But if you use this, you have to import PDFs into LiquidText - which is a manual process from your reference manager of choice.ĭr Jeff Taekman, who featured on MPU back on Episode 169 nearly 7 years ago, uses a range of tools and brings them together into an academic workflow - he wrote up his workflow in 2015 and recently updated it.
For example, I have dabbled with LiquidText on iOS which is phenomenal for PDF annotation and bringing together ideas. I think you are spot on here, One challenge is that some of the best-in-class features are not always standards-compatible, so it’s not easy to pick the best app for each task and integrate them into a cohesive workflow. You may find that you can better deal with the annoyances when you can find an app that provides the best benefits on the things that you absolutely need to be robust, consistent, and intuitive. The best approach at the moment is to decide what matters most in the entire envelope of actions classed under “citation management”… Zotero is middling in this regard - it doesn’t obey standard keyboard shortcuts, and there are a lot of ‘nice to have’ UX features that were in Papers 2 eight years ago which it doesn’t have.Īnd much more… I did once write a list of features an ideal app would have, once I finish the PhD I’ll dig it out. Papers 2 was excellent about this, Papers 3 required switching panes completely and was much more clunky.
I feel there is a real lack of a good software in this space, especially for Macs - Bookends seems to be the closest. Similarly, editing tags requires switching a pane and is very clunky. In Zotero, this is done through tags, where you can then assign colours to particular tags - but you just get a small coloured square at one end of the item in the list, which is almost invisible. It made visually identifying particular items very easy - I used to have book reviews purple, for example.
To take one example of this: when you assigned a colour to an item in papers 2, the background of the whole row changed colour. I previously used Papers 2, which had an excellent UX (although was limited in other ways). However, the UX in Zotero is far from ideal and I find it really clunky to manage different collections and quickly find relevant documents.
I’ve ended up going with Zotero, because I know my data isn’t locked in (FOSS, works offline without a login), and because it supports the particularly weird citation management in my field via. I’ve really, really struggled with the choice of citation managers throughout my PhD.