Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

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alanterra
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Joined: Wed Dec 20, 2017 4:55 pm

Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by alanterra »

How do people who use Bookends collaborate in writing drafts?

The last project I worked on, I wrote the rough draft, passed it around and got a bunch of comments. My choices at this point were
  • continue with the draft that I passed around and make all the changes, including bibliography formatting and adding and deleting references, by hand
  • transfer the comments to the pre-scanned document by hand, and make changes to the reference format to fix problems in citation style, and then scan before distributing to co-authors
  • create two documents, one with the body of the paper and one with just the references in "{…}" format, and generate the bibliography and paste it at the end of the active document, so that it was easy to use Track Changes to incorporate the edits from my coauthors.
I ended up using the 3d, but it meant that I had to keep the list of references in the text and in the bibliography in sync by hand.

I am using an rtf editor, so I think that Bookends "unscan" feature (which I have never tried) isn't available to me, and I have no idea how unscanning would interact with "Track Changes" in word processor.

Are there any other solutions people have figured out? (None of my collaborators use Bookends).
Jon
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Re: Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by Jon »

I won't comment on the collaboration part, but Bookends can scan and unscan RTFs made with Word (and probably NWP). But other WPs that don't have hidden fields won't work.

Jon
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danzac
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Re: Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by danzac »

I too am interested in this, as I'm about to begin a collaborative project, and the other person is a Mac user as well. I've noted in another thread Jon suggesting the use of another iCloud account that can be shared for syncing. Has anyone actually tried this?
~I swore to myself that if I ever got to walk around the room as manager people would laugh as they saw me coming and applaud as I walked away~
nh220
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Re: Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by nh220 »

I have quite a bit of experience using Bookends in a collaborative context, and these are the options that I have used:

1. Convince my collaborator to switch to Bookends, or at the very least use Bookends for this project. Obviously only works if that person uses Mac and is willing to take on the (modest) expense and effort.

2. Draft everything collaboratively but leave one person in charge of all the citations. In my most recent co-authored article my co-author would just type in citations manually and incompletely (she did not use anything at all for reference management), and then she emailed me the PDFs she cited or other relevant information and I entered it into Bookends. A bit of a hassle but to my mind easier than convincing/teach someone to use software in the first place (and since she cited literature I wanted to read anyway, it was not a big deal "archiving" it in Bookends).

3. Use Zotero or similar for this particular project. As long as you do not use custom reference types, the export/import between Zotero and Bookends is pretty seamless so it is not a ton of effort and Zotero's collaborative features are pretty good (I have tried to do something similar with EndNote, which was a disaster).

They all have their pros and cons obviously, but I hope this is of some help. I have never tried using another iCloud account but obviously that's an option if you can convince your collaborators to use Bookends.
danzac
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Re: Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by danzac »

nh220 wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 3:29 pm 1. Convince my collaborator to switch to Bookends, or at the very least use Bookends for this project. Obviously only works if that person uses Mac and is willing to take on the (modest) expense and effort.
Thanks very much for these insights. Can I ask, in the example of getting someone to adopt Bookends, how did you share notes and citations?
~I swore to myself that if I ever got to walk around the room as manager people would laugh as they saw me coming and applaud as I walked away~
nh220
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Re: Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by nh220 »

danzac wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 4:17 pm
nh220 wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 3:29 pm 1. Convince my collaborator to switch to Bookends, or at the very least use Bookends for this project. Obviously only works if that person uses Mac and is willing to take on the (modest) expense and effort.
Thanks very much for these insights. Can I ask, in the example of getting someone to adopt Bookends, how did you share notes and citations?
The short answer is, we don't. Each Bookends library is separate. The benefit is that both of us in this case can continue use the software we prefer and do not have to force ourselves to use Zotero or what have you. It is a clunky solution and maybe it will kick up errors down the road (we haven't tried to format it yet). In essence, the workflow is something like:

1. Collaborator sends me PDFs of articles she is citing and inserts the citations in the shared doc (Google).
2. I import the PDFs so I have references in my library, then manually edit the unique ID to match hers. (This is really easy--just command+option+click on the ID in the reference window).

So not exactly elegant. If you truly need a seamless syncing solution with shared notes and such, you are probably better of using Zotero (I use it for teaching and it is fine, but nowhere near as powerful as Bookend). I guess you could use Citavi Server too, but I believe it is still Windows only (not sure) and besides, it was bought by QSR so who knows what will happen with it in the future (when trying to address this problem last year, I also looked at Endnotes but it was unusable on a mac--Zotero is the only option that really worked reasonably well).
DrJJWMac
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Re: Collaboration with co-authors--ideas?

Post by DrJJWMac »

My lesson is that only one platform should be used for reference management and only one person should be in charge of citation management.

Reference management is all about collecting the information. You all need to have the same platform where you post the information and can all go to find that information. You cannot afford to be scattered about trying to figure out what one person sees in their reference manager versus what you see.

In this regard, I have found Mendeley to be a strong stalwart across my team for many years. I was an earlier adopter and still carry a larger allocation than the current new user. I use Mendeley primarily because my team uses Windows and primarily because it does a better job with PDFs than Zotero. Mendeley has however now retired its iOS app. So, it may soon be time to switch to a different reference manager.

Citation management is about putting the citations to that information properly into the document. For my own use, I have been playing with Bookends and ReadCube Papers, the latter especially because it seems to promise to that I can move all members of my team to the same platform for the citation management and the reference management.

At the end of the day, I actually use BibTeX for the hard nuts-and-bolts of citation management. This is because I write in LaTeX. Fortunately, BibTeX does a superb job to help me oversee, track, and clean up the citations compared to Bookends (or Papers).

I stay out of the decisions from anyone who works with Word and tries to do citation management (because it only makes me rather frustrated).

In summary ...

Pick ONE PLATFORM OR METHOD to share your references with the team. Pick ONE PERSON to manage the citations that are to be put in the document for the team. Standardize on your processes based first on making these two key decisions.
--
JJW
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