It's hard enough to keep track of all the information you gather when you do your own research. Once you add others to the mix of searching, finding, and gathering resources for research, it is vital to both keep track of your own contribution and to decide as a group on a method for collecting books, articles, web resources and the like. This page lists some tools especially good for harvesting information with a group.
Zotero is great for capturing web content, PDFs, and biblographic information about published documents. Sign up with your Carleton email address to get unlimited storage!
EverNote is great for harvesting information -- especially images -- from the web. The main drawback is full sharing with a group. Only "Premium" members can have full group editing, though free members can share "view-only" access with group members to individual notes or whole notebooks.
EndNote's strengths are in ingesting citations and documents from journal and book databases and catalogs. There are options for collecting web content, but they're not as smooth as tools created for that purpose. You can use EndNote to search databases directly, too.
You can share your citations with group members, but not the documents.
If you write in LaTex and like Zotero, you'll love BibDesk, which allows you to create bibliographies, organize your papers, plus it integrates seamlessly with LaTex, allowing you to create in-text references and reference lists in your documents. It's free and an open standard, so you don't lose your bibliography over time. Mac only.
Fantastic way to quickly save things you want to read later in a clean, distraction-free format. Not as robust at organizing and doesn't manage citations, but if this can make the step of following up and reading far more pleasurable - a nontrivial aspect of a large project. Syncs to mobile devices. The downside: like a pocket, you can't share it with your group. But it may be a good way to manage your own contribution.
Questions? Contact reference@carleton.edu
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