Research paper tools for mac

a_greera_greer
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I am working on my first large (for me) research paper, I have found PDF services and print to pdf, but one thing that stumps me, I would like a manager of bibleography and maybe a formatter for APA, Any ideas?



PS, I will use this once - maybe twice so I would perfer a free-bee.



oh yea, Any idea as to why the EBSCOhost database(s) dont work in any browser eccept IE on the mac but runs fine in konqueror and Firefox on other platforms?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    amoryaamorya Posts: 1,103member
    Learn LaTeX. Free, powerful, and supports APA formatting and referencing.



    Amorya
  • Reply 2 of 4
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Well unless it integrates with what he already has, it's a pain. :/



    Don't get me wrong, I *live* in TeXShop and BibDesk, but that's only because I can.



    a_greer, head over to versiontracker.com and look up those two above apps. Installing TeXShop will walk you through the rather large, complicated, and thankfully automated installation of the entire LaTeX distribution. Then you can go grab BibDesk, and start entering your biblio information. BibDesk allows drag and drop of already formatted references, and it'll do a good job of parsing them out, but I don't know if it'll support what you have access to.



    Also, when you're done, you'll have a PDF of your bibliography, not formatted text you can drag and drop into other apps like Word or Pages. (I suppose you *could* select the text with the Preview text tool, and drag that over, then do formatting manually, but oy.)



    EndNote is the commercial product that swears it integrates with Word, et al, but I've heard nothing but complaints about the last couple of updates to it. Luckily, though, they have a fairly cheap student version if you want to just use it a few times.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    earlier thread
  • Reply 4 of 4
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    One major flaw with EndNote (besides the price) is that it can't merger different files together well. We were working on a large grant application and had to have the secretary manage the endnote database. There's no way to merge databases without having a bunch of duplicates and each user saving references a different way. It's caused by endnote not having a unique identifier for each reference. Most often we make up a new database for each paper we work on. A single user may not have that problem.



    But BibTeX has the same problem so ... use LaTeX and BibTeX.
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