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kareinaWhile poking around in the archaeology department wiki today I saw a tab for "working with long documents", and within it was a recommendation for Scrivener, with a comment that there are often student discounts. I remembered hearing writer friends referring to using a program of this name before, so I clicked on the link provided and did some reading. What I read made me think that it might be rather useful for someone starting a new PhD project, but I couldn't find anything on their pages that mention citation management. Therefore I filled in their form asking about using EndNote with Scrivener, and went on with other tasks. Much to my surprise and delight, they replied to me very promptly, with a link to instructions on how to use EndNote with Scrivener. Since their advice boils down to what I tended to do in Word (leave the citations as code for where they will be inserted till ready to print), with only the details differing, this sounded quite reasonable to me. Therefore I sent a quick thank you note to them, and went and downloaded the trial version to see what I think.
I totally approve of their trial policy--it is a 30 day trial. That means thirty days of using the program, not 30 calendar days. Today all I did was go through the full tutorial (which took around 3 hours to try all of their suggested tasks, and quite a few variations besides). I am convinced that this will be a useful tool. Tomorrow I will try creating the project that will, ultimately, become my thesis. I fully intend to do a thesis by publication this time (since I didn't last time I did a PhD), which means that I will publish four or five papers over the next few years, and use them as the main body of the thesis, adding an intro and conclusion section. This will be easy to manage in Scrivener, which will let me have as may sub documents as I want, and give me the option of labeling them with their status (e.g: to write, early draft, final draft, submitted manuscript, published version).
I have only barely scratched the surface of this new research project I am undertaking, however, since deciding to become a PhD student again I have started adding more and new tools to my repertoire, and I think that this will be a much higher quality project than my first PhD was (not that there was anything wrong with it).
I totally approve of their trial policy--it is a 30 day trial. That means thirty days of using the program, not 30 calendar days. Today all I did was go through the full tutorial (which took around 3 hours to try all of their suggested tasks, and quite a few variations besides). I am convinced that this will be a useful tool. Tomorrow I will try creating the project that will, ultimately, become my thesis. I fully intend to do a thesis by publication this time (since I didn't last time I did a PhD), which means that I will publish four or five papers over the next few years, and use them as the main body of the thesis, adding an intro and conclusion section. This will be easy to manage in Scrivener, which will let me have as may sub documents as I want, and give me the option of labeling them with their status (e.g: to write, early draft, final draft, submitted manuscript, published version).
I have only barely scratched the surface of this new research project I am undertaking, however, since deciding to become a PhD student again I have started adding more and new tools to my repertoire, and I think that this will be a much higher quality project than my first PhD was (not that there was anything wrong with it).