Tag Archives: Literatur

All you need is text – Markdown (via pandoc) for academia

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Many students struggle to find an adequte format for their thesis. Ironically the advent of “modern” WYSIWYG programms seems to make it harder to consistently format a text.

While learning LaTeX may be a bit too much to ask for, markdown is a very minimal language that together with pandoc affords all typesetting needs for an academic paper. While source documents written in markdown can be opened and edited on any PC (or mobile), pandoc can translate it into beautifully formatted pdf and docx (if it is absolutely necessary) files. Specifically markdown implements:

• Headings, Subheadings
• Figures and tables
• Citations and References (here in APA6 but other styles are also possible) • You will need to edit the file paper_v1.md

See the example paper.

Once pandoc and latex is installed the following command generates a pdf.

pandoc -s -S --biblio biblio.bib --csl apa.csl -N -V geometry:margin=1in paper_v1.md -o paper.pdf

All files necessary to replicate and adopt the example can be found here .

Mendeley – powerful reference manager

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Mendeley is a powerful free alternative to commercial reference managing software. With Mendeley you can not only collect your references within one software, it allows also a PDF-Preview, tagging, different cititation styles, provides an Open Office / MS Word plugin and so on. You will find a complett list of features under http://www.mendeley.com/#features

Furthermore, Mendeley is not only a free reference manager – it is as well an academic social network. You can create groups and share with them your library and, if you want, PDFs as well. This is really great if you work on a paper together with some colleagues or if you want to provide a library for a student. Thus Mendeley is not only installed on your computer – you have an online login and online access on your library as well.

Pro:

  • Mendeley is really easy to use! :-)
  • Mendeley is a powerfull reference manager with an broad amount of functions for free
  • great automatic detection of imported PDFs: You need just to put a PDF into a “watched folder” and Mendeley will complet reference data by extracting them from the PDF and gathering them online
  • very good PDF view
  • your library is available online as well as on your computer
  • if you want you can create public libraries and share your research with other people

Con:

  • Personal and shared web space is limited to 500 MB – for more you have to pay (but for my personal use 500 MB seems to be enough so far).
  • You can share in the free version with only ten people
  • It is free, but seems to be not really open source
  • We experienced some problems with the function to highlight text or make notes in PDFs directly in an earlier version of Mendeley. Once after a major crash all notes were gone. :-( We hope this bug is fixed.

JabRef

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JabRef-Uebersicht

JabRef is a literature administration. Features are the administration of literature and the supply of this information in an BibTex-file for LaTeX user. But Jabref can also be quite valuable without LaTeX, at least if you want to administer your literature independent of the platform and the prducer

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Erkenne Dich selbst – Publish or Perish

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If you really want to know how much (academic) impact your work has, you can use publish or perish a free little program, that has been around for some time. The software uses google scholar to automatically retrieve publications you have authored and papers that cite you. From this it extracts several citation metrics, most importantly:

  • the number of citations per article and
  • the h-index, i.e. the number of papers (e.g. i) that have at least i citations each.

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