Secondary bibliography for literature review

[joseph_anton]

I am starting work on a "review of the literature" for my project, which I hope will be a fairly comprehensive list of references to the research that has been done previously on my topic. I have not always been able to consult the originals of the books and articles mentioned in this review, and they are not necessarily cited from in the main body of my project. Some of the references are to articles in journals that were not archived electronically, and which are not available in physical form in the libraries to which I have access. It seems that there is still some value in gathering the reference in a situation like this.

My question is: what is the best way of handling the references for this secondary bibliography, which obviously serves a different function to the bibliography for the body of the text? Is creating a second Bookends library the way to go, or is there a smarter way to handle these references alongside the others in the one library (bearing in mind that there will be a fair amount of overlap between the two)? Thanks in advance for anyone with suggestions on this topic.

[Jon]

Others should chime in, but if it were me I'd try to handle it all in one library, using keywords to separate the primary from secondary sources. Then you could use a smart group to examine or manipulate one group or the other.

Alternatively (and not mutually exclusively) you could use a static group to maintain your secondary sources (assign 1 to the right column of the Groups pane next to that group and you can add references to it with a Command-1), as well as color labels if you want visual clues (define the meaning of the colors in Preferences, for example make Red = Secondary).

Jon
Sonny Software

[joseph_anton]

Thanks for the quick response to my question, Jon! I knew there had to be a smarter approach to this than starting over with a new library.