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It's not taken me long to rediscover that a major facet of the student experience is the reading of lecture notes, journal articles, reports, book chapters, and other material. When much of this material is available in electronic form (notably Office documents and PDF) you need software that lets you work with and manage those formats effectively and efficiently. Sometimes this necessitates ditching your preferred tools in favour of de facto standards for the sake of compatibility: function must take precedence over form. And don't forget to shop around.

The de facto Office standard

I happen to like Pages and Keynote, part of Apple's iWork suite. But every time you need to open a Microsoft Office document you have to convert it, then re-save as .doc or .ppt for outside compatibility. I decided it would be easiest to obtain Office 2008 for Mac, since most downloadable teaching materials on my course are in Office formats. Just because a university promotes a certain supplier, however, doesn't mean you'll get the best deal. For example the Microsoft HE/FE Student Select Agreement offered by Viglen makes Office 2008 available for £36.00, but they add £10.00 for media plus VAT plus £3.53 delivery—total £57.58. Software4Students offer the same product for £30.15 plus VAT with free delivery and a £1.95 transaction charge—total £37.35.

Reference and citation management

EndNote is the de facto reference manager used at University of Sheffield, and they sell the Windows version directly to students for £80. For the Mac version you have to go to Adept Scientific, who offer EndNote X2 (Mac) to registered students at a "special webstore price" of £81.08 inc. VAT here. But the interesting thing is that if you follow this link to use IP authentication from within the uni (or from home via a VPN connection giving you a UoS IP address) you can get the exact same product for £64.62 all-inclusive.

The Library provide EndNote connection files for searching the University of Sheffield STAR catalogue:

EndNote lets you group retrieved (or manually entered) references which I think is a useful way to maintain module reading lists. Unfortunately you cannot, however, nest groups (e.g. to create sub-topics or reading per lecture):

Another inexplicably missing feature is the ability to quickly flag/ unflag references to "mark as read" for example. As a workaround I customized the display fields (in Preferences) to add a column to the right of File Attachments for showing a tick (Option-V) using the Research Notes field once I read that item:

The University actually advise against using the convenient EndNote connection files for interrogating databases such as MEDLINE, listing the following disadvantages:

• You cannot see any links to the full text of articles;
• You cannot use any of the remote database's advanced search features (such as cited reference search in Web of Science);
• You cannot see any thesauri provided by the remote database;
• You do not have access to the remote database's online help;
• You cannot see any warning notices such as forthcoming service disruptions;
• This facility will not work if you are using a RATS or VPN connection.

Their first point is superseded by EndNote's new-found ability to discover and download full text articles (see below), and the last point is simply untrue (RATS is a remote-access password authentication system). They make a very good point, however, that implementing complex search strategies (e.g. exploding terms, combining results, etc.) is best done using the database's own web interface (exporting then importing the output into EndNote). But online searches via EndNote are just fine for tracking down a specific paper or book.

Before settling on EndNote I also looked at the Mac-specific Bookends and Sente (which certainly have their advocates) but was not impressed having already downloaded Papers. Papers makes EndNote seem like the software your grandfather used: it's fresh, clean, elegant, stable, responsive, intuitive, and inexpensive (even without the 40% student discount). Papers focus is the "reading" part of an academic workflow; it doesn't format citations but it does integrate with apps that do. For example you can drag-and-drop references from Papers into an open Word document and later use EndNote to format the bibliography (although only after exporting your Papers collection to an EndNote library—an awkward step that may introduce errors). Alternatively (perhaps only for smaller essays) copy references directly to the new Word 2008 citation manager—no third program required. The Papers webcast (54 min) is enticing but is sadly this app is only for journal articles, and the developer twice failed to respond to my e-mail requesting a student discount coupon.

Click thumbnail to enlarge image

Papers sets a new interface benchmark

The rise and rise of PDF

Like Papers EndNote X2 allows you to find, download, store, and open full text articles in PDF format for on-screen reading:

Mac users have had it pretty good for a while now in terms of OS-level support for viewing and working with PDF—now an open standard. Preview in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) added the ability to annotate PDFs, or alternatively you could use Skim. To access the annotation tools in Preview right-click the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar; drag Annotate and Mark Up to the toolbar. You can now ring important sections, highlight key points, and pin notes and hyperlinks to the article that will persist when the PDF is re-saved:

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