On 08/06/2017 09:21 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Aug 2017 16:40:01 -0700 (PDT)
> Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com> dijo:
>
>> On Sun, 6 Aug 2017, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>>
>>> I'll disagree with the suggestion to use Lyx, but only because Joe
>>> said that he needed to do college papers. For academic writing today
>>> you are in a world of pain doing citations and the references
>>> section unless you have either Zotero or Mendeley, and both work
>>> only with LO/OO or MS Word.
>> I did not mean to be harsh in my response, but LaTeX/LyX and bibtex (or
>> biblatex) are very heavily used in academia. Take a look at it.
> I suspect that you are out of date. Indeed, those tools still exist and
> they are amazing. But the PSU Department of Applied Linguistics teaches
> graduate students how to use Zotero to create the student's
> bibliographic database and use it to create citations and references
> with Word or Writer. Consider the following workflow and compare it to
> your tools:
>
> 1) I open a web page that contains a book, journal article, or web
> content. At this point Zotero (which is an add-on for Firefox or
> Chrome) adds a little icon to the title bar - a book icon if the work
> is a book, a text icon for articles, etc. I click on the icon and the
> work is automatically added to my database, complete with all the stuff
> needed to create citations and references lists in my word processor
> later. I can do this with any web page that has a work on it, including
> web pages from any library. As it adds the work it pops up a split
> screen in the web browser where the bottom half will display what
> Zotero proposes to add to my database of works. About one time out of
> twenty Zotero messes up slightly and I need to make a minor
> correction, e.g., Zotero thought that 'Joe Blow' was the author of the
> work but in fact he is the editor. Except for such corrections I don't
> have to type a thing, almost completely eliminating typos in my
> citations and references list.
>
> Later as I am writing my paper in Writer I decide to cite Blow's work.
> Zotero has a second add-on for Writer (strangely it is installed in
> Firefox, yet its functions are in Writer). The functions are available
> in a Zotero toolbar, whose leftmost icon is 'Citation.' I click on the
> Citation icon and I get a Zotero popup whose opening page asks me what
> academic style I want. I select APA, and thereafter this question is
> never asked again - the add-on makes this a part of the document. Then
> the popup asks me to select the work I want to cite, displaying a list
> in alphabetical order by author. I select Blow's work and instantly the
> citation appears in my paper, in perfect APA formatting. (There are
> options, e.g., I can add a page number to the citation.)
>
> Finally, as I have finished writing the final paragraph of my paper, as
> a student who understands APA style requirements, I enter a blank line,
> then type and center 'References,' then another blank line. At this
> point I turn to the Zotero toolbar and click on the icon for
> References. Bang! There is my reference list - every work that I have
> cited in the paper, perfectly formatted for APA requirements.
>
> I have used Zotero and Writer to produce dozens of academic papers, and
> I have never found an error in the formatting of the citations or
> references list, nor has any professor.
>
> And additional nicety of Zotero: If I wish I can click on a button on
> the Zotero popup in Firefox and Zotero will copy my entire database to
> their servers. In case my world goes up in flames, I can recover my
> database in minutes. Of course, my database also resides on my own
> computer, buried somewhere in .mozilla.
>
> An additional comment about bibtex. One of our professors had been
> called upon to teach the graduate level class on academic research,
> required for master's degree candidates, his first time teaching the
> class. He asked me about Zotero because he knew I used it, yet he had
> not. In our conversation he said 'apparently no one uses bibtex any
> more, at least not around here.' He added that the department
> guidelines for the class specified instructing the class in Zotero
> and/or Mendeley. I ended up giving a guest lecture to the class on
> Zotero. Some had already used it, most had not, and as I demonstrated
> it there were wide eyes and mouths agape as they realized they need
> never type a references list again.
>
> Oh, and one more thing. I remember being taught in the late 50's that
> if you wished to cite someone you entered a superscript footnote in
> the text, which was to appear at the bottom of the page, something like
> this:
>
> 1. Blow, Joe. Some Work He Wrote, Doubleday, New York, 1958.
> 2. Op cit.
>
> And so on. Today, there may still be an academic style that uses
> footnotes for citations, but I can say that I have not seen such a
> method for citations in a long time. In the APA style we put the
> citation in the text, e.g. (Blow, 1958). Footnotes are discouraged ('if
> it's important enough to say, say it in the text'), but are allowed for
> explanatory material. Needless to say, in several years at PSU I think
> I have used an actual footnote only a couple of times.
>
> If you do academic writing where you need citations I encourage you to
> take Zotero for a spin - easily completely removed if you want.
> Personally I'd be lost without it. But if I want better typesetting
> after I write a paper in Writer + Zotero, I copy and paste into
> Scribus. You can do the same with your favorite Lyx.
Wow, John, thanks for the enthusiastic details! for references
& citation sand other APA goodness, I'v ebuilt styles in LO as needed.
Marylhurst's library access to EBSCO lets me choose a style for
citations ,and it's just a copy&paste from there into my References section.
On a related note, I'm contemplating purging my (Ubuntu 16.04)system
of LO and installing OO, as it seems to have a better reputation for
stability and developer responsiveness to bugs. Any opinions on that
among PLUGGers?
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