I have previously written about why I dislike footnotes. Here, I explain why I dislike numbered citations. Numbered citations Consider this text fragment (from this paper): Here, the numbered citations are not helpful. You need to scroll to the end of the paper to figure out wat they mean. In practice, I only do that when I really want to check the reference. Most of the time, I just ignore the citations....
By coincidence, I have had several discussions about footnotes, endnotes, and different types of citation styles recently. Such discussions often end up in “religious” wars, in which researchers from different disciplines argue why “their” system is the best. I often find myself agreeing with none or everyone in such discussions since I work in and between several disciplines (the arts, humanities, technology, psychology, medicine) and publish my work in journals that use different ways of handling citations and notes....
Yesterday I wrote about the possibility to import references from Google scholar into a reference program. Today I found a description on how to do this directly from within BibDesk. This is a good example of why you should bother to read the upgrade notes when you download new software. Then I would probably have discovered that the “bookmarks” menu was introduced in version 1.3… Well, this makes a great application even better....
I have written about the (hidden) possibility of exporting references from Google Scholar before, but since several people have asked about this lately, I will post a more detailed description of how you can do that here. It is very simple: 1. Go to Google Scholar 2. Select the Scholar preferences: 3. At the bottom of the preferences page you find a menu where you can choose which reference format you prefer (BibTex, Endnote, Reference Manager, etc....