BibDesk

For anyone who finds himself or herself writing academic (or non-academic) papers and reports and would like a way to organize their references, I have an answer. BibDesk. Of course the catch is that it is for the Mac, but more and more of my readers are using Macs now that I figured I should share. The other catch is that it is a program for managing .bib files, which are used with the LaTeX bibliography tool – BibTeX.

Anyone undertaking a larger research paper should serious consider learning LaTeX if you want to avoid the general headaches that writing it in MS Word will bring. This is especially true if you plan to include a lot of equations, figures, tables, references, etc. and don’t want to have to worry about keeping track of them all. In fact, LaTeX is particularly good with mathematical and other scientific equation typesetting – many Math Textbooks are written using LaTeX.

For those using a Mac I recommend TeXShop as a good editing environment with integrated typesetting.

This isn’t for everyone. Some of the finer details of using LaTeX and BibTeX really require you to get your hands dirty, but if you are up the challenge, the results are definitely worth it.