12/31/2023 0 Comments Zotero vs endnote 2018 reddit![]() From BibTeX to ProCite …Īt the time, Swinburne had a licence for the reference manager software ProCite. ![]() Although initially fairly basic, it has been developed and extended over the years to the point where one can now use BibTeX-based citation managers (such as JabRef) for quite complex research work, while still running over the top of ordinary plain text files. BibTeX uses plain text files to store information, which makes it effectively independent of any specific program to maintain, since any text editor can be used. I had spent a great deal of time during my PhD compiling a reference bibliography using BibTeX, the bibliographic system that is paired with LaTeX, the software that allows typesetting of complicated mathematical equations using a plain-text typescript (and with which my PhD was typeset, being 50% text and 50% mathematics). ![]() ![]() This was one of those “of course!” moments, when something un-thought-of seems very obvious in retrospect (like plate tectonics did in the 1960s). As well, the Futures Program at the OECD had recently produced a new version of a CD-ROM of scanning called Future Trends (OECD 2000) that used a scanning hit ‘1-pager format’ that I very much wanted to emulate, but it was not yet clear to me then in late 2000 how to combine the core ideas and category schema of these two major scanning resources into the form I wanted.Įnter an article by Verne Wheelright (2000) in Futures Research Quarterly, which made the case for using bibliographic citation manager software for capturing scanning. The categories used in Future Survey had greatly informed the choice of scanning categories I had started with. This approach seemed a little too heuristic for what needed to be positioned at the time – it was taking place in a university, after all – as a very rigorous research process, so another solution was needed.Īs part of its membership benefits, The World Future Society had since 1979 published a monthly Future Survey magazine that provided 50 abstracts of future-oriented information sources, whose principal scanner, Michael Marien, offered invaluable advice for anyone undertaking scanning practice (e.g., Marien 1983, 1991). At some point these would somehow ‘gel’ into themes which would eventually ‘crystallise’ into useful forms during later scenario work. Rather, he said that he simply let it ‘pass through’ his mind and make connections with whatever was already there from previous reading and scanning. The well-known high-profile futurist Peter Schwartz – famous in the futures field for The Art of the Long View (1996) – had said in that book (p.81) that he no longer rigorously tracked everything that came across his desk – there was just too much. I had begun to print and file hits according to a set of target categories, but this approach was rapidly becoming unmanageable, and it was clear this would not scale over time to large volumes at all well. When I started out doing futures scanning for Swinburne 20-odd years ago, the question of how to collect, collate, store and report the scanning hits I was finding popped up pretty quickly as an issue. There needs to be a way to effectively capture and store the hit first, before analysing it for its degree of relevance, timeliness and so on for the organisation, ahead of ultimately committing it to institutional memory as a formally-submitted scanning hit. While it is certainly excellent as a way to report the hit, it nonetheless comes a little way down the track of the full life-cycle of a scanning hit. The indispensable book Teaching About the Future (Bishop and Hines 2012) – to which I’ve already referred elsewhere – describes the basic format of a ‘scanning hit form’ that can be used to report a scanning hit (Figure 6.1, p.182 Appendix 3, p.288). During our futures scanning – doing what I like to sometimes call ‘ futures intelligence analysis’, which therefore makes us ‘futures intelligence analysts’ – we need a way to capture and retain the information about the scanning ‘hits’ we find. ![]()
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