Scrivener for students?

[GiacomoLaw]

The one major problem with Scrivener for academic work is its lack of any true bibliography features. Sure there's a Preference for setting a Bibliography Manager but that is rather simplistic. One could compile the document to Word and then use a citation manager such as EndNote. One could compile the document down to LaTeX and then outside of Scrivener use the standard LaTeX workflow to use bibref. Equally one could use MMD and achieve much the same result as with LaTeX.

Hi there again

I've started to use Zotero for citations, where I make a footnote, and then paste the full note citation in. Is this a good way to do it? It gives me a bibliography at the end, along with numbers throughout the text.

I've seen things about using RTF/ODT scanning plugin for Zotero, but don't really understand why it's needed if I can do it the above way.

Thanks!

[mbbntu]

The advantage of using temporary citation markers, of the kind used by Bookends, Endnote, and various other programs, is that it permits you to scan at a later date and output a bibliography and citations in whatever format you like. So, if you write a learned article and want to submit it to several journals that use different formatting conventions, you can make different versions of the article at the touch of a button. Equally, supposing you write a PhD thesis for a university that wants you to use Harvard style, and you then arrange to publish it as a book with a company that wants you to use another style of bibliography, it will take a matter of seconds to scan and produce a version in that style. And if you use a numbered style, using temporary citation markers and scanning when you have finished means that you avoid the possibility of having to renumber everything because you have inserted an item at a late stage.

[gr]

I've started to use Zotero for citations, where I make a footnote, and then paste the full note citation in. Is this a good way to do it? It gives me a bibliography at the end, along with numbers throughout the text.

If I understand correctly and you are just using the footnote system, what you are getting is just numbered endnotes at the end of your doc. Citations in footnotes/endnotes are just a kind of in-text citation.p, and what you are getting at the end is not a bibliography. Unlike a bibliography, your citations at the end are not in alphabetical order, but in "order of appearance".

Also, the numbering you get this way is not a version of the "numbered" citation style (if that is what you were thinking). First, the footnote numbers probably appear as superscript numbers, not bracketed numbers in the text. Second, and more importantly, if you need to make reference to the same work again in the text, making a footnote there gives you a new number (not the same one as used before), even if the content of the footnote/endnote contrives to refer to the same source text.

Best,
gr

P.S. I agree about what was said about using "temporary citations" rather than formatted citations -- it gives you access to one of the fundamental features if bibliography software.

[Jamie Hatzis]

Hi. I am using Bookends - or at least trying it out. I have historically used Papers 3 but for some reason the app does not work as well as it used to and I have grown disenchanted. Anyway. I have added temporary citations and compiled to RTF. How do I know get the actual citations to format?? I opened the RTF in TextEdit but can't figure out what to do from here. It was fairly straightforward when I use to do this in Papers using Paper's citations.

[mbbntu]

In Bookends go Biblio -> Scan Document.

[Jamie Hatzis]

Thank you! Did the trick!

[xiamenese]

A word of warning: only open a Scrivener created RTF in TextEdit if you are checking if something is a bug in Scrivener itself or the underlying Apple text-engine. TextEdit will strip out images, footnotes, comments and maybe styles.

Bookends works very well with Nisus Writer Pro, where you can do the scanning from within NWP—NWP works perfectly with Scrivener too, as it’s default text format is also RTF. Mellel also works very well with Bookends, and although powerful, it is much more quirky and has its own proprietary text format.

Unless you are a Word user, to me, the optimum combination is Scrivener, NWP and Bookends. But others may differ.

Mark

[RHvdG]

I am simply adding citations and references by hand. I'd prefer a built-in bibliography tool, I guess, but copying formatted bibliographic information from a website like citethisforme.com is no great effort, and when adding citations, if I don't know the author/year combo of a publication I am referring to, I'll just open my References document in a copyholder (that I then reduce in size; it would be a nice touch if Scrivener remembered the size of copyholders for specific documents). Easy as pie.

[Crozier654]

Yes, It is definitely possible to use scrivener for essays as well as assignments. You have to just download relevant template to do so. scrivener is an amazing tool for writers.

[comcredo]

let me suggest you take a closer look at Citavi

[Alexo]

Let me give two cents here.. many many months after the initial question... (Anyway, at the time the question was made, I was using Scrivener for that exact purpose.. just had not registered here yet.)

I started to try Scrivener some years ago, looking for a platform, to write my future book, with a port to Linux and at that time none of those available convinced me.

Meantime I was in the way to graduate as a biology teacher and decided to use Scrivener to my articles and reports. That lead me to use it to plan my internship classes. The result is that all my classes for two years until graduate were done within Scrivener; Lab protocols, handouts, tests and exercises, and all disciplines contents and planning were prepared inside Scrivener (including a collection of videos, photos and feedback --digitized tests and texts from the students).

Later, at the time to make the reports for my supervisor, I used LibreOffice to the references. Many people use and recommend Zotero that seems to be very handy, but I did it all just with the built-in bibliographic database of LibreOffice.

So, Scrivener can be very useful to students and to make academic works. At least, it were for me!