Christopher O'Keefe
Links and Tools
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I've included links for various tools that help me manage my time and work. I hope they help.
Links
Tools
- Notes, Bibliographies, and Article Management: I use Zotero. With Zotero I can keep track
of all of the articles and books I refer to in a single place,
integrates with MS Word (and OpenOffice) to create in-text citations
and bibliographies, attach notes to specific articles, and create
outlines. Your database can be exported in BibTeX format, which allows Zotero to
(indirectly) integrate with LaTeX.
- Statistical and tools: I use Stata
and am
learning R.
Both have steep learning curves, although R's is
much steeper, in my opinion, although I understand that R is much more
flexible and is more powerful where graphics are concerned.
- Word Processing: I use MikTeX, as my text editor of choice. It has a fairly flexible library: I can use MikTeX to edit ASCII, HTML, Stata, Perl, and R code.
- Presentation: LaTeX is a highly flexible
typesetting environment. If you've ever been frustrated with
Microsoft Word trying to format something you want, be prepared to both
be more frustrated (in the short term) and more satisfied with both the
process and the control you have over your output, as well as the
output itself. You can use it to prepare papers as well as to
create presentations (a la PowerPoint). I still use word for quick notes, although I am playing with
using basic notepad as a notes file. Unfortunately, LaTeX takes lots of time to learn, as it wasn't designed with the relatively computer illiterate in mind.
- If you like LaTeX but your colleagues and coauthors don't, you might try Pandoc . It translates (most of) your LaTeX code into an RTF document, so your coauthors who don't use LaTeX can modify the document. LaTeX2RTF is another approach to this, but it's not as flexible.
- BibTeX is a reference management software that integrates with LaTeX. I've adapted Peter William's APSR BibTeX style file to be more complete for working papers and fixes some smaller issues. Christopher DeSante has an excellent file on using the APSR BibTeX file, which applies to using this one as well. My BibTeX file is here. DeSante's instructions are here.
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