If you are like me, then you are constantly reading academic documents on the computer, and many of these were scanned in. This makes it difficult to annotate, copy text for a quotation, or otherwise manipulate the document in the ways that support scholarship. Enter Optical Character Recognition. This is a general class of technologies that can look at images with words in them, figure out where the words are, and then convert them into a format that you can edit. My current tool of choice for converting papers from images to text is Adobe Acrobat, though there are many alternatives. The documents that I typically convert are already in PDF format, and so it is incredibly convenient to run the OCR feature within Acrobat and then annotate the paper using Acrobat, Preview, or Skim.
Zotero is a free, open source, reference manager that works as a Firefox extension (making it cross-platform). Each version is better than the last, and while I don’t use it exclusively, I find it incredibly helpful while browsing for articles. It makes it incredibly easy to grab all of the citations off of a web-page such as a google scholar listing, and boasts many of the same features as Endnote including pdf storage and Word integration. It’s not yet my primary reference manager, but it may be soon!
Incidentally, if you are already using Zotero, you can use Zotero to grab citations for any articles that I have a PDF for simply by viewing the page on which they are listed.
Endnote is my primary reference manager. It allows me to store and retrieve academic references, link PDFs to the reference when I have them, and insert both references and an APA formatted bibliography into my word documents as needed. I highly recommend using it early, regularly, and with notes / annotations so that you have everything in one place from the beginning.
I recently discovered (as in: a colleague suggested this to me) the freeware app Skim for the mac. This is a great little tool for taking notes within a PDF file that I find much much more usable than acrobat pro. Also, the notes are stored in the file-system, not in the actual PDF so that you can then email the pdf to a colleague or student without the notes. It supports attaching notes, highlighting, circling / labeling, a presentation mode, and a host of other handy little tricks.
Academic Tools | Joshua November 12, 2009 | 
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