Yep. That’s right. You need to insert the citation markers, via your reference manager, and then after you’ve compiled to Word (or whatever your final page layout editor of choice may be) use the reference manager to convert the markers to properly formatted citations with a properly formatted reference list at the end. It feels like magic watching it happen.
Now is the perfect time to switch. By doing manually (kind of) in your undergraduate classes, you will have developed a decent understanding of how references work and what is required for your referencing style (APA, Harvard, etc).You will also be aware of how time consuming it can be to get it all just right. But here’s another benefit of reference managers. They don’t just format your citations for you, in fact many people argue that this is a relatively minor function. What they also do, is store and structure your references. So you will end up with a central repository of all the hundreds (thousands if you do a doctorate!) of PDFs you downloaded, and all of them with their citation information attached. Even better, most of the reference managers will now auto-populate this data so you don’t need to enter it yourself.
Use a reference manager. Just do it. Don’t hesitate, don’t question it, don’t quibble over the cost. Over the course of your postgraduate studies it may be the application you use more than any other (including Scrivener). In the end, it doesn’t even really matter which one you use as long as it makes sense to you (Papers, EndNote, Zotero, BibDesk, Bookends, Sente - they’re all loved by someone). They all have trial versions, so visit the websites of a few of them then, trial two you most like the look of. Get a sense for how easy you find them to use, whether they work with Scrivener in a way that makes sense to you, and whether they will output the specific publication style that your field requires. Then make your decision and move on. You are unlikely to regret choosing to use a reference manager, but you will almost certainly regret not using one.
Hi all,
Sorry for hijacking this long dead thread.
I been searching for days(really) to understand how to get bibdesk to do this on my compiled rtf.
Maybe im not searching for the correct keywords but if any one can please point me in the direction where I can get more information how to do this it would be very much appreciated.
This is all very new to me (bibdesk/scrivener both downloaded 4-5days ago), and I private messaged a few people with no luck. I have also tried to read the Bibdesk helpfile and wikipage both with deadends either in deadlinks or they are not explaining what I have to do. This seems like exactly the thing i want to do but how do i search for it or find out what is that step exactly? i just really want to start writing and not worry about the inline citing and end bibliography.
Hi ren, I don’t think Bibdesk is quite the tool you need. Bibdesk searches and stores references, but doesn’t directly generate formatted bibliographies in processed manuscripts. Bibdesk is primarily designed to work with LaTeX (the [Bib] comes from BibTeX), and by default that is what LaTeX is supposed to do. There are scattered scripts that do scan word processor files, e.g. sourceforge.net/p/bibdesk/wiki/ … lescripts/ — but those scripts seem to target old versions of Word or Pages, who knows if they work these days…
Your options for tools that do scan RTF files: Bookends, Papers (deprecated), Zotero, Endnote. Everyone has their preference and you’d need to test and choose among them (my advice remains the same: Bookends is well worth the money).
Now if you wanted to keep using Bibdesk (I think it is actually a quite good ref manager, certainly better than Zotero / Mendeley in quite a few areas), then one option is to use Scrivener+Pandoc to output a DOCX file, it will take your temporary citations, the BIB file and a style file and create a final formatted manuscript automatically. To quote from Wikipedia:
Pandoc is supported by Scrivener if installed, and you never need to “scan” a file, as Pandoc does it for you…
Great question: to which there is no direct answer… Different referencing styles have different issues, but agreed with the comment below: the usage of temporary citations used by Bookends allows you to change styles (in case you decide to publish in a journal that uses a different referencing style) with only a few clicks, while the process requires much, much more work in Zotero or the other reference managers.
Having tried Zotero, Mendeley, Endnote, Refworks and others, I think Bookends works best with Scrivener.
About Bookends, there are several posts that clearly specify how to use it.
Greetings
