Really good software alternatives for students.

chicken

Active member
Hey guys, I just wanted to share with you some cool programs I have found and been using this year at school this year.

Skim- All of last year I was using preview to open and annotate my lecture notes. I stopped using it because you could not left justify text annotations (minor thing). Once I got used to skim, I never went back. It can just do so much more. I just recommend you practice using it in a lecture that you can afford to miss some notes. There is a little bit of practice but once you are used to it, it is way more effect.

Papers-This is great if you are dealing with lots of journal articles. It can take so many steps out of your research. You can store, preview, search and download articles all in one program. It also makes your reference section a breeze. You can drag and drop it right into word/open office citations menu and then you are done!

Mendeley-Is half what papers is, it's how I organized articles last year. you have to download the pdf and citation file and then import them to mendeley though.

Zotero- is basically the other half of papers, also free for firefox. It makes it super easy to download multiple journal articles, then you can import them into mendeley. I don't really use mendeley anymore, but I still often use zotero to grab stuff and then manually put it into papers.

Firefox-OK who doesn't know about this one! It is just so much more useful than safari for many reasons. It's also great to run two browsers if you often get distracted by your facebook/NS tabs (just like I am right now).Then you can have firefox just dedicated to school and use safari for other stuff.

anyone else know of some good programs? or better ones than the ones I listed?
 
Hi Chicken! Thanks for including Mendeley in that overview of paper management programs. If I could just make a quick correction on one point - you can get papers into Mendeley in several different ways. Using the browser bookmarklet athttp://mendeley.com/import allows you to add the reference (and PDF if available) in one click. In addition, it works like Papers to organize your collection of PDFs automatically and integrates with your word processing software to simplify citing papers or generating a bibliography.

I hope you'll pardon the intrusion, and if you have any further questions, just give me a shout.
 
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