Every researcher has (and hopefully solves) the reference management problem, and yet it seems hard to find concrete information on how people do it. I use Apple’s Pages to write up my research. The major alternatives, Word and LaTeX, have two crucial flaws that just drive me crazy. First, and this is a big one, Word handles images very poorly. It does not float text around them well and it provides almost no help in alignment. LaTeX has the type and compile routine that disrupts my concentration. LaTeX does have one thing that I love: \cite{} plus BibDesk.

While writing my latest research paper, I found a way to get the best of LaTeX, BibDesk, citeulike and Pages—and quickly. I love citeulike. The early parts of research involve a lot of page-hopping from research paper to research paper. I often have 25 tabs open in this phase. Citeulike offers a convenient bookmarklet that parses major research sites for reference info (no more hunting for the issue number). Plus, it offers the standard amount of socialness. I love it. Now I can quickly connect BibDesk to citeulike to Pages. It goes like this.

1. Download, install and open BibDesk.
2. Right click on Library and select Add External File Group.
3. Enter http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/yourciteulike?key_type=4
4. Download and install (per readme) CiteInPages.
5. Drag references, one or more at a time, into Pages.
6. Choose CiteInPages alpha numbered from the BibDesk scripts menu.

The CiteInPages scripts are wonderful and open source. This gives me the best of LaTeX and Pages. Very nice. I hacked together a nearly-compliant ACM-style template for BibDesk. Install it in BibDesk’s application support directory: ~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/Templates. If you want to use it, you first point the CiteInPages alpha numbered script to it by editing the script. Such is the price for good and free.

I’m in love.

This was posted Jun 18th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under yay!, tactics. You can comment on this post or trackback from your own site.