I’m new to Scrivener and I’m trying it for my academic writing. I intend to use it mostly for law review articles. This means long papers, structured (divided into parts, sections, subsections), and in Bluebook format. I have been unable to find a template that is suitable for this. Would anyone here know were to find a template? More generally, would anyone have advice on using Scrivener for law review publications? Is Scrivener useful for this?
I saw some old posts on using Scrivener for law review publications, but they were mostly very old and few. Any advice would be very welcome.
I am not familiar with legal articles at all, so my contribution is as superficial as it can be. But I am familiar with Scrivener, and therefore I dare to say that it can be useful for legal articles. Because Scrivener is designed for writing long, structured texts.
Project Templates (script writing aside) are basically just combinations of folders and documents—and these are not strictly seperate entities like in a file system—with names. In a novel template a folder might be called “chapter”, in a legal article template it would be “part” or “section”.
What I mean is that you can create your own template, probably quite easily. (Of course, it would be nice if someone here had done this before and posted it here—let’s wait and see). The structure in the Binder is the structure of the article, that’s all.
Compiling, i.e. creating the output format to make the article look exactly as it should, admittedly has a learning curve. But once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll see the benefits. And if you need help, this forum is the place to go.
As for the Bluebook format—I had to look it up, of course—it is a citation format, if I understand it correctly. So it’s a job for a citation manager like Zotero, EndNote or Bookends. You need one that has the Bluebook format among its citation styles or allows you to create it. And it must work with Scrivener, seamlessly at best. Bookends (macOS and iOS/iPadOS only) does this, but I really can’t say whether it would be the best choice for legal articles.
Further to @suavito’s sage comments about Scrivener with which I agree fully, like @suavito I am not familiar with Bluebook format. I use Zotero very occasionally.
However, via Google I found Boston College Law Library provides something for use with Zotero
Other law libraries might have something available.
My spouse is a part-time law student, so I’ve seen some of the Bluebooking questions up close. As suavito and rms note, there isn’t a template with Bluebooking requirements ready-made for Scrivener, from what I’ve found.
My recommendation is that you start with Scrivener’s blank project template and add documents for each part of your article as needed.
For citations, we have this wiki page on the forum that provides an overview of using Scrivener with reference software. That article will give you some insights into how different citation management tools might work.
From what I’ve seen on websites like this one from the U of Washington’s law school, only some reference management programs will support the Bluebooking formatting.
If I were choosing one from this list, I’d likely go with Endnotes since it’s available for both Windows and Mac. It’s the more expensive option, but your university might include access to it with the other software you can access with your student ID.
And, if you expect that the work you’re doing on this journal might carry over to summer internships or to your first few years as an associate or law clerk, having your references from this journal article in those roles could be useful.
You might also see if anyone on the journal is already using Scrivener and has tips for you. I’d really like to see it adopted more widely in law schools because I think it’s well suited to building exam prep outlines and writing the papers for those writing intensive classes the ABA requires.
Thank you very much @suavito, @RuthS, and rms for the incredibly useful comments. Yes, I need to figure out how to compile the document at the end to make the paper look roughly as I need. I wonder if I could use Scrivener first for a rough draft, and then move to Word for the rest (footnotes, finer revisions, etc.).
Thank you very much again for all the valuable advice!
Like many others here, I’ve used Scrivener to write academic articles and monographs. You can use it for footnotes, etc. I only compile to Word when I need to share with readers/editors; otherwise everything is accomplished in Scrivener. I don’t use a reference manager as I do that by hand, but if you search the forums you’ll find tons of advice on Bookends/Endnote/Zotero/etc integration.
You can (and should!) use Scrivener for every step of the writing process, compiling to word when you need to give the formatting one last tidy up before you share/submit.
Don’t worry about templates. Dive in with a blank project, start by creating a new ‘document’ in your draft for each section that you write and you’ll soon figure it out. When you get stuck, check the tutorial or come back here for help.
Bookends permits creating your own citation template, usually by copying and editing one close to what you want. The Bookends owner (Sonny?) is VERY helpful with Bookends questions and possibly could create the citation template you need.
Bookends is really nice with Scrivener.
Agree with @dspady . The site @RuthS gives a link to doesn’t include Bookends as that is Mac only. And yes, Jon of SonnySoftware is extremely helpful, so, as long as you know the details of the BlueBook citation formats, I’m sure he would help create one if it is possible.
I totally agree, the support for Bookends is amazing.
In my opinion, finding the right reference software is the key to writing in any field where references are mandatory. Whether I’m writing a long text in Scrivener, quoting from a printed book in my note-taking app Drafts on my iPhone, or in DEVONthink, my repository for everything, my own stuff and excerpts, PDFs, etc—Bookends is always there to help me reference properly.
So when I move an old snippet of text from a cobwebbed group deep in a DEVONthink database to my latest text in Scrivener, Bookends has it in its database and gives it the citation format I need.
However, I still recommend writing in Scrivener!
Starting with an empty project is a good idea. If you build it from scratch, you will learn a lot about the program.
But there is another way: Create an empty project. But then take a legal article that is as structured as possible. With parts, sections, subsections, subsubsections… And it should be in DOCX format.
Then import it into Scrivener’s draft folder. But not by dragging it, because that would copy it there in one piece. Instead use File/Import/Import and Split... and select the option Split using the document's outline structure.
If the imported DOCX file has real headings with levels and not just bigger fonts, you will get a structured binder. And that could be the starting point for your own legal article template.
Wow, this is fantastic! I just tried importing an article with proper headings and it worked perfectly. Scrivener divided it into different documents according to the relevant sections/headings. This is the template that I needed! It also gave me a view of how things should look like if I worked on them in Scrivener. So this is extremely helpful. Thank you very much!
Thank you, Kinsey! I will try to write a more polished version in Scrivener, then. One odd feature of US Law Review articles, which sets them apart from most academic writing, is the insane amount of footnotes in the paper (roughly 30-50% footnotes). I wonder if that makes a difference, since I feel footnoting is rather clunky in Scrivener, but I may be wrong on that. I will give it a go. Thanks for the advice!
Thank you everyone for the useful advice and guidance. Apologies for the multiple replies (I realized too late that I should have replied once, quoting the relevant posts. I’m learning to use the forum too…). Thank you!
@FUM24 Scrivener is fantastic. There is no doubt about that. But since you’re new to Scrivener, I’d like to point out something that sometimes gets forgotten, but can become important.
I don’t think you mentioned how many documents (and which RTF, PDF, web pages) you want in a project. Perhaps the only weakness of Scrivener is that the app cannot search large amounts of documents at a reasonable speed. Depending on the number and mix of documents, this becomes a problem for people who want to have everything in one project.
So if you have no problem, for example, splitting your research material into 3, 5 or even more projects … perfect. But if you expect to manage everything in one project, then you will have problems.
I actually find the footnoting to be superior in Scriv. I like that the anchor can be dragged to a new word and anchored there instead, as well as the ability to have the inspector show footnotes independently of what is being displayed in the editor (i.e., I can scroll down the editor and the inspector won’t automatically “follow”). It’s a very flexible tool.
It might be a little restrictive if your footnotes are very discursive (and lawyers are people to discourse ), but give it a whirl.
Can I point out that, when @fto mentions search being a problem, his experience is apparently through having all his Scrivener material in a single project, hence his suggestion of splitting it up. He has been an outlier in the way he has been using Scrivener to date.
That said, I have found in the past that having a high number of Inspector footnotes or annotations can cause a slowdown in editing in Scrivenings mode, though that was a number of OS reiterations ago, so I have no recent experience of it,
And further to @Kinsey’s post, I would say that if in Project → Project Settings -. Formatting, you set Use Footnote Marker set to whatever you find convenient (default is * but you can set it to [fn] or whatever), you can drag that footnote marker to a different location if you need to without worrying about anchoring it to a specific word.
Thank you all for these excellent suggestions! I have been trying all this and it’s working great. And thanks @xiamenese for the tip on the Footnote marker, which is exactly what I needed (as @Kinsey says, our footnotes are very discursive, and we have lots of them, so it’s easier to have it anchored to a separate symbol).
Thanks again to everyone for the extremely useful advice!
