It seems like these tools will work together pretty well. There are a slew of interesting (and compelling) overviews of the software and its functionality that seem like they’d be really useful for organizing a large-scale research and writing project (ah, the [hopefully] imminent dissertation).
Here are some of those additional links:
- http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/scrivener-scrivening-scriverastic/23026
- http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/interesting-software-more-on-scrivener/57686/
- http://girlscholar.blogspot.com/2011/06/productivity-tools.html
and the link for the program itself:
- http://literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
Ryan Cordell - March 9, 2010 at 8:35 am
I must confess that I don’t. When I started grad school (and was, I like to think, less savvy about this stuff), we were pitched Endnote, which I tried and hated. Perhaps the problem was with me, but I found that I spent more time reformatting Endnote’s imported citations than I spent entering them myself. I gave Endnote up, and by the time I’d found out about managers like Sente or Zotero I was so far in that creating a citations database seemed like a huge time investment.
That said, under the “General” preference pane for Scrivener, you can choose a “Bibliography/Citations Manager” (the preference is toward the bottom, just over “Import Options”–I had trouble spotting it). According to Scrivener’s documentation, once this is set you can then call up your manager through the menus Text–>Bibliography/Citations or using the hotkeys CMD+SHIFT+Y. If you try this, let me know how well it works with Sente.
If anyone out there knows if Scrivener will play nice with Zotero, let us know that, too. I do need to shake off my laziness and start rebuilding my citations databases soon.
Scott - March 9, 2010 at 8:56 am
Yes! For me, Scrivener plays just fine with Zotero. At least for Zotero’s wonderful drag-and-drop-a-reference tool: you select one or more references within a folder (use case: for each folder in Zotero, select all and drag into its own Scriv page), and just drag it over. That works fine for Scrivener, and spits out bibliography entries in whatever format you’ve selected. (Text format tends to be ugly for ANY pasted text in Scrivener – and it’s a rummaging-through-the-menus ordeal to get the equivalent of “paste matching document style” in word.) But it’s really kind of magical.
My “Research” pages in Scrivener tend to look like this: Bibliography entry, notes on how I’m planning to use a source, then quotations with page references. You could also keep all the bibliography entries on a single page, then link each entry to notes and transcriptions. (That would be great, actually.)
Speaking of drag and drop, my “export” method for Scrivener to Word is just to click “Edit Scrivenings” on the pieces of my draft I want to export, which gives you those in the viewport as a continuous document. Select all, copy, and paste. It captures all the annotations and footnotes (I suppose using the preferences active in the export menu).
Amy Cavender - March 9, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Zotero should also play nicely with Scrivener via its RTF Scan feature.
