James Tauber

journeyman of some

blog > 2005 > 05 > 22 >

Managing Bibliographies with BibDesk

In preparation for my PhD, I recently started investigating Mac OS X tools for managing BibTeX-based bibliographies.

In the end I settled on BibDesk. I chose it because of its functional merits but it's great that it also turns out to be open source.

Because BibDesk allows me to link from an entry to a file on my local filesystem, I can just put all my PDFs in one directory and use BibDesk as the interface to all the papers.

One thing that I don't believe is supported (yet) but which I would like to use as work on my literature review continues is the ability to express relationships between entries, perhaps along the lines I talked about in Google Scholar and Typed Citations.

Of course, then I'd like to express relationships between other entities such as authors and maybe concepts, terminology, etc.

Actually, a lot of the features I'd like to see in BibDesk are features I'd like to see in any MicroContent browser. After all, that's what BibDesk really is.

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Comments (2)

Shane Magrath on Sept. 21, 2006:

Can I suggest the use of LyX for your academic writing. I've just finished my PhD (graduate next week) and LyX is absolutely the right tool for the job.

http://www.lyx.org/

Rowan on Oct. 16, 2006:

Have a look at citeulike -- I use this with BibDesk (I also use JabRef on my Linux machine but BibDesk seems to have the edge). As for LaTeXing on the mac I use Aquamacs + AUCTeX + TeXniscope

Created: May 22, 2005
Last Modified: May 22, 2005
Author: James Tauber