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Old 10-20-2008, 01:11 PM
TimP TimP is online now
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Join Date: 01-31-2006
Location: I live in a small village a few minutes south of Ottawa, Canada
Posts: 58
I've used UR as a Research Catalog

Seems obvious, I guess, given the name of the product, but I organized the research for my masters thesis entirely with UR. (I actually started in TreePad but attributes in UR are unbeatable.) I created a form to store reference information (which included Y/N fields for things like "Cited?" and publication names so I could track where I got all the papers) and then used the details text to store commentary about the references I found. I spent months sorting through a couple hundred references and then when I got down to my writing, I used a subtree to hold the text of my work. The ability to search all the references I downloaded was invaluable. When I was done, I simply generated my reference section (although the formatting wasn't too cool) by outputting the results of a search for everything I had marked as "Cited".

If I could ask for a feature that would have helped me, it would be to allow RTF formatting of the contents of form fields so that my reference listing would have been a lot closer to perfect without the need for extensive reformatting after I imported it to MS Word. Actually, a true report formatter would have done the trick as well or even the ability to output a web version of part or all of a UR db would be awesome. (This is the one feature of TreePad that makes it amazing for developing long texts over long periods of time.) I'm not complaining, though. UR devours online research problems.
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