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IDEA: Research Note-Taking Program (MindMapper)

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vevola:
Hello! Please excuse my lengthy post, but I hope I express myself clearly!

THE IDEA
I was looking for a good software that would help me with my research, but I haven't quite found what I needed. Doing research, you take a lot of notes, and we all know that it is important to cite our works. I was looking for something that would help me organize my notes and help me create my works cited or bibliography page.

The only freeware I found is Scholar's Aid Lite, but it has a lot of extra things which I find not necessary and a lot of important features which I find imperative. I was looking for something essential, which could be useful both for the scholar and for the general high school student preparing a research project or thesis.


Here's what I was looking for in the "ideal" scholarly research software, which I've divided into two sections (taking notes and compiling the bibliography):

Note-taking
My idea takes off of something like Biblio2 <http://www.scholarsoft.com/biblio2.htm> (just looking at the GUI you can tell it's an older prog and hasn't been maintained for years) but with some other functions (tagging, portability etc): I read a book (chapter, article, webpage, etc) and I can input various notes to create a tree outline of the text (like i'd do with Keynote or similar). Each note is tied to its reference, which I input following bibliographical standards (MLA or APA are the most famous). So I'll have the head of the list being the reference, and each note hierarchically listed below, each of which includes the page off of which I took the note.

Each note should be distinguished (by color/icon?) as a quote, a summary, or an idea and have a title and a "body" (like in Biblio) but some other "types" could be glossary, images, and general. Each note should have the possibility of having given tags and linking to other notes for easy cross-referencing and searching (which is the key here and which is what I haven't found in Biblio). I also think it would be great to have the possibility of having hotkeys to create new notes, etc.

When I've finished creating an outline of each book, article, webpage or whatever, I should be able to export it or save it as an RTF or DOC. I should also be able to move around the notes so I can export or print my own mental maps using various notes from various lists (that is, using any note from any book or article). In this case the bibliographical reference should travel with the note and I should have the option of also exporting the reference with the page number at the end (see below).

Compiling your bibliography
The second part of the project should be to help me compile the bibliography. There are many websites out there that will help in formatting the bibliography using MLA or APA standards (like http://www.studentabc.com/builder and http://citationmachine.net/) and even a great freeware (http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioexpress.htm). It would be excellent to incorporate something like this within this program to make it complete, however I understand that it could become more complicated to create, especially if the coder doesn't know much about the citation system (MLA/APA). My idea would be a link to citationmachine.net where you'd be guided in the process and at the end you could copy and paste from the site both the Bibliographical citation (what would go in the bibliography) and the Parenthetical in text citations (what would travel with each note, simply adding the page number(s) before closing the parenthesis). These two pieces of information are important to keep wittied to each note.

The Bibliographical citations should be able to be organized in folders with tags and maybe a note, and should be able to be exported alphabetically, so you would have your References cited or Bibliography already compiled.

I think the key here is tagging and linking. If there would be a way to link each note to its reference, and you could create a system of tags, this would help you out in organizing your thoughts and creating effective outlines for your paper.

Often I've seen a lot of software created for almost futile reasons. I think something like this could help a lot of students in effectively organizing their thoughts and their research and be useful in their writing projects.

Hope to find a positive response! All the best!

urlwolf:
HI Vevola,

I´m sure you have seen this, but just in case:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2362.0

As you see, notetaking is a hotly debated topic. I wouldn´t expect somebody here to start a large project to create all the functionality that you mention. Having said that I think you have some really useful ideas that I haven´t seen anywhere. I really like the idea of keeping the reference together with the note, and exporting to word.

I tend to do all you mentioned using simple outiles as text files, and endnote reference formats: {like this, 1990, #234}. Since it is plain text, when I finish I can just cut and paste into word and use endNote to get any kind of formatting (e.g., APA) for the references.

Hope this helps

mouser:
bibliography programs are complex programs..
Endnote is the most used one now i think.  I personally have used Procite.
(now both owned by same company).  There are others.

mouser:
let me add i would highly recommend using a good bibliography program if you intend to publish papers - they can be invaluable not just in organizing your references, but in reformatting the output for different formats, which you will find yourself doing after a paper gets rejected and you have to resubmit it somewhere else  :huh:

vevola:
Besides the bibliography side, what could you suggest to organize the notes and note-taking process?

URLWolf's suggestion is good, and is what I used to do in my index-card-note-taking days, but I'd also like to number the notes (I like to see the sequence) and the tag words.

What else do you suggest?
vevola

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