#readcube

oké, az tetszik, hogy meg lehet adni proxit, mintha mindig az egyetemen lennék, és akkor automatikusan letölti nekem a cuccokat, nem kell minden weboldalra egyesével bejelentkezni.

de az egy kicsit furcsa, hogy ha nem tudja kiszívni a pdf-ből a metaadatokat, akkor nem adhatom meg őket magam, hanem úgy jelenik meg, hogy “untitled”, ami nem teszi egyszerűvé a keresést.

az pedig, hogy nem szinkronizál a saját fiókomon belül, nevetséges, ennek így mi értelme van?

I’m trying out a new citation manager called Read Cube that was recommended by my advisor.

I’ve tried Mendeley, Zotero, and Endnote (among countless others) and still haven’t found any that are quite to my liking. I am using Scrivener to write my dissertation, and since Scrivener still isn’t compatible with any citation managers (I’ve tweeted multiple times), I have been trying to find something that at least eases my workflow process. 

PROs • You can search for the papers using PubMed, Google Scholar, or Microsoft Academic:

• Allows for these auto list creation, PDF downloading, and enhanced PDFs from web publications:

• It automatically pulls in the citation, which all of the other programs do as well, but I find this one a little more intuitive. 

• If you have something in your files that ReadCube doesn’t automatically register, I love how you can simply highlight the title/author etc and it gives you an auto option to input the highlighted text to its designated spot. Here I’ve highlighted the title and put my mouse over “title”:

and it automatically inputs the text for me

Then I click Find Match and the citation is magically imported

• There is a recommendations tab, which gives recommendations for literature you might find useful based on the literature you have in your folder. I like this feature, but honestly my articles span the gamut from mHealth, anthropology, nutrition science, maternal and child health, etc. So while it’s useful for this particular project I’m writing right now, I’m not sure it will stand up to the test of time.

OVERALL pro -- 

• Easy to import, find PDFs. 

CONs • I cite a lot of conference papers, and I still have to put these in manually. This seems to be a glitch in the system somehow.

• When you “manually” search for an article, it only allows searching via Google Scholar or PubMed, which doesn’t quite work for me, so I end up having to manually input them anyway.

• When I click on a paper, it takes me to that paper and it’s not easy to get back to the folder where it was, which is an annoying quirk.  For example, I want to look in the physical activity folder

and I want to look at this article:

So I click on read, which pulls it up

But then there is no way for me to “go back” to the folder. So if i’ve forgotten where I got this paper from, and I want to scroll through others, I have to manually go back into my folders, figure out which folder it was in, and then where in the folder it was. Not a *big* deal, but a time waster nonetheless.

• I can’t collapse my folders, which makes it super annoying to scroll through when I’m trying to find a reference.

• And finally, there are some random papers at the end and the program won’t allow me to drag and drop them into a folder, and I can’t figure out how to move them. So my only option is to delete the document and re-enter it at this point, which is a huge time-suck.

OVERALL con -- 

• Steep learning curve, may not be worth it in the end.

Overall Impression

Probably will go back to Mendeley or something else. Any suggestions?

UPDATE - 7/21/15

I forgot to add that read cube also allows you to cope and paste the citation so you can do it by hand. The way I do it is first soft click on the paper:

Then click on the note pad looking icon

Now type in the citation style you are using; in this case, I am going to use APA

Then I highlight the citation, right click to copy. 

Then in Scrivener, I add the citation as a footnote to make it easier when I upload it into Word or InDesign.