![]() I downloaded Mendeley Desktop and installed it on my primary home PC.If you know all about this already you can probably skip a few paragraphs here, but this is a blog for people like I used to be. Yet this situation has now been transformed by a great new piece of academic productivity software, Mendeley. I insisted all my PhD students use EndNote, but this was very much a case of do what I say, not what I do. My key files are all on my home PC, and maybe I should have delegated the task to someone else – but given the state of things on my hard drives, it seemed a shame to let anyone else in on it. Over the years I’ve ‘evaluated’ EndNote several times, but the interface for getting stuff in is so unbelievably poor I could never resolve to start. I’m always in a rush and the thought of solemnly sitting down and re-typing all my references into EndNote just for the joy of having a single reference list that I could pull stuff off and re-format – well I could never find the time or summon the effort to do so much for so little return. I rationalized this state of affairs to myself many different ways. When it came to compiling references and bibliographies, I usually had to cannibalize a previous listing (and re-format by hand for new citing requirements) and then roam around in Google Scholar and Google Books for all the extra stuff I knew I wanted but often could not find. Sometime Microsoft’s flakey search function found a word I’d remembered to put in the title, most times it didn’t. I could not overview all my literature files at once, and I usually had to remember which file I wanted and which sub-folder to look for it in order to have any hope of finding it. ![]() They were variously titled depending on how rushed I was at the time I downloaded them and on how informative or useless the original file name had been. They were segmented into lots of different folders, sometimes with duplicates, often in the wrong place. Essentially I had hundreds and hundreds of PDFs, extracts from blogs and web pages, Word documents and presentations swilling around my hard drive. Until a few days ago the way I organized my research library was a bit chaotic, and doing references and bibliographies was always a huge chore that often took days at a time. ![]() Mendeley can offer all academics and PhDs massive productivity gains. Patrick Dunleavy explains how the (relatively new) software Mendeley has transformed his previous time-consuming practice in just a few days, and solved numerous other problems of accessing literature and sources wherever he is. For more information on BibTeX, see MIT IS&T's page: How do I Create Bibliographies in LaTeX.A key aspect of scholarship is how you create a personal research library, find and access your sources when needed, and cite them accurately and comprehensively. bib, that is separate from the LaTeX source file. Each reference in the bibliography file is formatted with a certain structure and is given a "key" by which the author can refer to it in the source file. ![]() For more information on LaTeX, see LaTeX on Athena Basics, provided by the Athena On-Line Help system.īibTex is a bibliographic tool that is used with LaTeX to help organize the user's references and create a bibliography. A BibTeX user creates a bibliography file, wth a file extension of. It is widely used at MIT for theses and other technical papers due to its prowess with mathematical and foreign characters. LaTeX is a typesetting program that takes a plain text file with various commands in it and converts it to a formatted document based on the commands that it has been given. The source file for the document has a file extension of. For those who are interested, here's information on LaTex and Bibtex compatibility.
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