I’m not even sure if I need citation software, as I’m writing a non-fiction piece that isn’t a “reference”. I’m just writing about what I do for a living.
I see folks raving about EndNote, which goes for $249-$299USD. Is that level of investment required, or even worth it?
Seeing as it takes forever for people to get back to you-if ever-I am primarily interested in the kinds of citations that I can just do without further fanfare.
What are your experiences with Citation software? Necessary? Nice-to-have?
Are there less feature-rich, yet satisfactory for publishers, versions you use?
As the OP said he was using Windows that would rule out BookEnds. Not sure whether Papers is available for Windows but Zotero and Mendeley are.
I’m a long term BookEnds on Mac user, but on Windows my choice would be probably be Zotero. Catherine Pope has written an e-book about writing Theses using Scrivener and Windows - you’ll probably find it on Amazon. I appreciate you aren’t writing a Thesis but it may prove useful as it also tells you how to integrate citation software with Scrivener.
For the purpose you mentioned, I wouldn’t think an expensive citation manager would be needed. Zotero is free and should do what you need it to do. As a graduate student who has much more invested in my citations and references working correctly, I decided to use Endnote, because I’d heard better things about it than many other citation managing software. Endnote works famously, and it integrates nicely with Scrivener in my experience (though it integrates MUCH better with Word, for obvious reasons). Once compiled, it takes almost no work to get all my citations and references in order and looking good.
If you want to go the Endnote route, and if you are a student, you can get a student version for less than half the price you quoted above. It’s the same program with the same features; it just has a “Student” badging on it. It’s still over $100, but not by much. Again, for your purposes, that might still be way too high (unless you want to go the SUPER poor student route and find a free copy somewhere online). It’s kind of a case of what do you need it for, how much will you use it, and will your use and need of it justify the price?
I wouldn’t know. I just listed a few that seem to be popular, for you to check out. I have been using Papers for the last three years and am very satisfied.
About integration with Scrivener: it depends on what you mean. I enter what Papers call ‘citekeys’ and can do it from within Scrivener, but it’s really Papers that does it, not Scrivener. When I am done writing I compile the manuscript into docx format (because the scientific journals want that) and open it in Word, whereafter the citekeys can be transformed into proper citations and the reference list is created.
I have tested some other citation softwares but didn’t like them, for various reasons. It’s like it is for all software. Some you like, some you don’t, and the only way to find out which it is, is to try them.
Hm, I would argue that Endnote is probably one of the worst ref managers on macOS (unless you really want CWYW in Word), so if I was spending my own hard earned cash I go somewhere else (I get it free and I still prefer a paid alternative)!
An interesting aside on my favourite reference manager, Bookends, is that it was released in 1983, and is still in development by the same developer!!!
For my PhD thesis I worked with Zotero, Bookends and Sente. I abandoned Zotero because it seemed to me (my opinion…) not enough tought software, for the work that I had in mind, and Bookend, because when I started to work with Scrivener, that was very long time ago it seemed that there was some integration between the two software, but when the thesis was advanced it was not.
At the end, I worked with Sente: it was easy for me make “command-Y” to paste a reference inline in the text from Sente to Scrivener, and to return to Sente with the same key.
I really don’t know if the current version of Sente permit this integration, but it worked very very well for me.