Colwiz seems like a great academic research and collaboration environment, a great resource collection, citing, and bibliography system… it is FREE, it wants to store your data on a dedicated cloud, etc, etc, etc,… so why does it seem as if Lterature and Latte are more interested in promoting the use of other tools (zotero, bookends, etc) with Scrivener? Anyone here have any experience using ColWiz and Scrivener collaboratively?
Second but related question: anyone here have any experience working within Scrivener excluseively (no external apps at all), until a project is complete, until the content is done and ready for publication? I am imagining some sort of workflow that sets up all of the relevant links and linked passages within scrivener in a format that could later be easily converted to properly formatted publication-ready citations, bibliography, index, footnotes, pull text, table of contents, list of illustrations and photos, etc?
Any help or tutorials would be greatly appreciated. I am new to Scrivener (first big project, a non-fiction science book).
It’s more the other way around. It’s the creators of Zotero, Bookends, Papers, etc who have adapted their softwares to work with Scrivener. Why not approach the people behind ColWiz and ask them to do the same?
As for your second part, about workflows, getting a print ready pdf is easy if you don’t make it too complicated. The more complex you make the manuscript, the larger the probability that you will have to make final adjustments outside of Scrivener.
But you will probably get some answers in here telling you that anything is possible in Scrivener, provided you learn LaTex…
I currently use Papers 3 on my mac with Scrivener. Have used Mendeley, Zotero, Endnote etc etc etc… Prior to Scrivener I was using the in built citation manager in Word - however, this approach is slow and does not manage references that well.
The ability to complete research in Papers and then as I use Scrivener a double tap on ctrl which allows me to select my research and insert its cite key.
What I do after that is load the document in word and use papers again to convert all the citekeys to references, and add the bibliography - complete my document formatting and done.
Added bonus with Papers is that I can also use it with Apples Pages…
Hm, I created an account, imported a bunch of refs (bookends exported endnote xml) and kicked the tires a bit. Don’t bother with the desktop app, is is basically a web page turned into an desktop app via node.js, wholly underwhelming (and sync was very poor between desktop and web service). The desktop interface is really bare bones. The web interface is somewhat better. Search is a basic interface to academic search engines, similar to other reference managers, but I hit bugs importing from several services like crossref. No way to customise or build your own import services. I hit a major bug, which was sometimes my library wouldn’t render at all, it would appear empty (this is using Chrome).
The actual job of reference management (normalising names, dealing with keywords, sorting out consistent journal names, fixing fields), is totally non-existent. You have to do everything one by one. No way to link references (i.e. a review of an journal article). No way I could find of importing or syncing PDF annotations.
It seems to want to merge a social network and a ref manager into an unholy alliance. I suppose this could be OK for some groups, but I personally don’t trust companies (colwiz is owned by publisher Taylor & Francis). Real collaborative research should be done using open science tools like http://osf.io from the Open Science Foundation. Other companies are far ahead in the academic social network space too (academia.net, researchgate etc.) so my overall conclusion is this is a poor reference manager tied to a poor social network. But it is another freeish tool and its unified simplicity may appeal to some people.
