Christopher O'Keefe

Links and Tools

I've included links for various tools that help me manage my time and work. I hope they help.

Links

• UCSD
• UCSD Political Science
• Brigham Young University
• BYU Political Science
• BYU Public Policy Program
• AidData: BYU The College of William and Mary
• Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP)
• The Political Economy of International Organizations
• International Political Science Society
• American Political Science Association
• International Studies Association

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.