I thought I would share with the rest of the community my current elation. I've been battling for the last semester the 'which citation manager is better' war. Being a student, I don't have a lot of money to spend on testing each product out to their full potential, so the free aspect of Zotero I've naturally been endeared too.

But, I've been trying to figure out a way to take notes with another application because I kind of hate Zotero's notes field. Don't get me wrong, I think Zotero probably has the best notes feature of any citation manager but I still wanted more. So, for the last few days I've been toying with Circus Ponies Notebook, a variety of citation managers and a variety of word processors.

As of now, I have chosen: Zotero, NeoOffice, and Notebook.

Zotero collects all my information.

I then copy the citation into Notebook and take my notes therein. For those of you who have never used Notebook it has a lot of useful features. Automatic indexing of words and a separate index for capital words, keywords can also be incorporated, and its SuperFind search tool is hard to beat. Plus, I simply enjoy having the power of a word processor for taking notes.

So its pretty simple:

Notebook and NeoOffice are in the same 'space' side by side and Zotero is in another space (I'm using a Mac).

I'm still contemplating pdf management. I have discovered a nice free tool called sidenote that hides itself, like the dock, in the side of your screen. You can then view pdfs or anything and make individual notes. These notes can be saved and exported.

Its a work in progress but I'm rather happy with my results so far.