From a comment on another thread about uploading pdf files, I’m wondering if having a lot of pdfs stored in Scrivener would be a good thing or if it would slow down the functionality of Scrivener. I was planning on uploading pdfs and all my research notes into Scrivener for my doctoral work. However, I’m a little leery because I don’t want it to slow down as I get more and more files and approach having potentially hundreds of pdf files in my document.
Any thoughts or suggestions on where to keep all your research notes and pdf files?
I have all references in Papers 3, my reference handler. Notes (assuming you mean notes gaken by me at various occassions) in Notability. I export the reference and its annotations from Papers3 and import it to Scrivener’s Research area, but not the pdf. Notes, no. Only if I need the note while writing.
I use Scrivener for writing, not as a heneral repository for everything. There are other apps that are better for that.
I’d concur - let your reference management software be the canonical location for a text, and link all your PDFs and notes from there. It will pay off in the long term.
I’d agree with what’s already been said. If you do any reasonably heavyweight research, it is better to keep research material in another program. I use Bookends and DEVONthink. If you use bookmarks, you can still flip from Scrivener to a source or reference work in a couple of seconds, and on most screens nowadays it is fairly easy to keep windows from two different programs visible at the same time. If you need to do that kind of thing a lot, it is worth investigating programs like Moom, not to mention Scrivener’s own saved layouts.
I had source material in a DEVONthink database amounting to about four million words of text (not to mention images and other material) and it would find stuff so fast I sometimes didn’t realise it had finished searching. Good program if you need the power.