jabref
Part of doing good reserach, I’m told, is finding good ways to manage information you come across during your travels. This might be journal articles, books, technical manuals, or any other medium you can think of. In the past I’ve just jotted my notes down on paper and done it that way - easy peasy. But a thesis is a bit more daunting. This thing goes for a whole year!
I’ve decided to put my big boy pants on and use something called JabRef to manage my information sources. Basically it is a tool to manage .bib files. These .bib files are bibliography databases used by BibLatex (or Bibtex for those of you kickin’ it old school). Believe it or not, I actually used to write .bib files by hand using good old Sublime. Horrific, right?
I’m currently using JabRef version 2.10. There are newer versions, but they require a bit of set up using Java - if I get time I might give Jabref 4.0 a go. One of the cool things that I like is that I can pull references from a web search straight into my database. Also, I can put notes and thoughts straight into the database entry for a source. Finally, to really shine it on, I can push citations into my .tex document by linking JabRef to TeXstudio. Neat, right?
MIT published this handy dandy cheatsheet to get you started using it. I’ve linked it, but the interface on JabRef is so easy that even future Shane should be able to pick it up no dramas.