This Sunday I decided that I would browse the internet for software that would help with writing research papers. I came across several programs with a range of functions. I think I have narrowed it down to using three programs that will help me do research from start to finish.

The ultimate goal would be to write a book from start to finish. So I need a way to collect and organize sources, organize the writing, and then insert the sources into the text.

This is what I came up with.

Papers - Papers is a program that allows you to organize PDF files. You can add citation information to the documents, keywords, abstracts, and pretty much everything else you would need. And of course you can use Papers to search for and sort documents.

EndNote – After collecting all of my sources in Papers, I would export the information to EndNote. That way all of my sources are ready to use in the actual paper or book.

Scrivener - I played around with the trial 30-day trail of Scrivener on Sunday, and I must say that I believe it will a great tool. Scrivener is a writing organizer. You can write segments of text, then view all of those segments as flash cards to reorganize the document by clicking and dragging the flash cards. You can add notes, tags, and keywords to the different segments.

Some Word Processor – Scrivener lacks when it comes to formating. It is only intended to be a used to create manuscripts. Therefore, I will need some word processor to do any final formatting, and add citations from EndNote.

Do you have any suggestions?

This will be my trial setup for a while unless someone makes a different suggestion. And by the way suggestions need to be Mac compatible!