I’ve spent several hours going through video tutorials, user manuals, forum responses, webinars, and more trying to figure out the best way to handle citations and bibliography information with Scrivener. I did read about a few different solutions, some free or low cost, and some high cost, but it seemed to me that all of the solutions required a lot of time and effort as well as an additional learning curve. I’d like to get some feedback here that might help me make a decision before I get too far into my next book project.
I write nonfiction narratives. I used Scrivener for my last book. It’s been several years since that book. What I remember is that I did all of the citation and bibliography work manually. The project I’m working on will have the following types of sources: video interviews, news coverage, depositions, trial transcripts, Skype interviews, phone interviews, in-person interviews, websites, etc.
As I’m conducting my research, I need to include where the information is coming from. Say I quote an individual testifying at a trial. I can easily set up a bibliography folder and if I need to cite a certain passage add a footnote and add the source to my bibliography, for example: Testimony of John Doe November 17, 2021. P 128. So I would need to attach that citation to the text. I would then need to add a reference in the select sources in the bibliography that might say – Testimony of John Doe November 17, 2021.
When I start actually converting research text into a narrative, I need a way to copy and paste and probably edit the reference text and have the citation info come along for the ride.
When I opened up my Scrivener project from my last book, it looked like I used inline footnotes for citations and manually entered each source into a bibliography text. I handled formatting and numbering after exporting to Word.
So, based on the above examples, should I take the time to integrate a citation manager, or keep it simple with inline footnotes and manual bibliography entries as I go? Also, based on my needs which of the following programs would you recommend: EndNote, Zotero, Papers, something else?
Thanks