Given the recent question in the forums about Bookends, I’m curious how many people are using EF to help organize research papers and/or dissertations. (I’m a journalist, but our needs would be similar.)
I’m finding EF unparalelled at keeping track of lots of information, and searching it. I chose it over the much-hyped DevonThink. (Especially once I discovered Skim and so could handle PDF’s better.) I’m not yet sure whether the note-taking function is ideal for reviewing and organizing notes, though. I use Word’s Outline view for final organization, but that means cutting and pasting out of EF’s notes, which is less than ideal.
I notice that users of Zotero, designed specifically for academia (and with bibliographic functions I don’t care so much about), have the same concern (organizing notes). Oddly, with all these great programs, there are still things for which index cards are superior (organizing things chronologically, moving them around into an outline).
Anyway, I’m curious whether and how people are using EF for writing papers that draw on massive amounts of notes.