#USING BIBDESK SOFTWARE#
#USING BIBDESK MAC#

#USING BIBDESK SOFTWARE#

To me, writing academic papers directly in LaTeX feels like I develop a software program.Well, I don’t use Zotero or Word so my workflow may be a bit different (and probably somewhat idiosyncratic). I have a hard time bringing my ideas to understandable sentences when I see so many brackets and backslashes. Multimarkdown (MMD) is a good combination of both worlds, content can be written without much syntactical noise and there is still structure. With the help of Scrivener, the workflow and organization of the MMD files becomes comfortable. Writing academic content, there is actually no excuse not to use a bibliography tool. It is open source, has a clean user interface and just enough options to categorize the material without being to overloaded. However, BibDesk was designed to work well with LaTeX.

Scientific Multimarkdown citations to LaTeX I tweaked BibDesk to fit into the MMD workflow. The official MMD documentation by Fletcher Penny is a good source for the conversion rules and possibilities of MMD cite keys to LaTeX citation rules. I’ll show the application his examples here. > (Webster, 2002 Smith 1999)īy adding a semicolon to before a closing bracket, we can create an inline citation: Here is how I want the input and output to convert to: Since I mostly write within the psychological rules, the final output after the LaTeX conversion is according to the “apacite” LaTeX package (see my previous Scrivener article for further information). 46) Auto-generate BibDesk cite keysĮvery time you add a new publication to your BibDesk collection, you are prompted to fill in the cite key yourself. While this is usually a quick thing, it often leads to inconsistencies with the naming.

Did you know BibDesk can auto-generate that key based on attributes you fill in, like author and year?Įnter Preferences > Cite Key > and Check ‘Autogenerate the cite key when enough fields are supplied’. I have clicked on advanced and set the Preset Format to Custom and I use this Format String: %a2_%Y%u1. Furthermore I checked the option Generate lowercase cite keys. A publication from McCracken and Maxwell from 2004 would result in a cite key like:Ĭopy MMD cite keys directly from BibDesk to Scrivener My cite keys will have the first to authors, an underscore followed by the year and an indicator from a-z. Now each and every time you cite something in your Scrivener, ie. MMD file, you would have to look up the corresponding cite key in BibDesk, open a square bracket, add a hash symbol and the type in the key.

This demotivates me from citing a lot, which must be improved. I’d like to use Alt+CMD+C to copy the MMD cite key and just paste it into my MMD file with CMD+V. ~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/TemplatesĪdd a new file there, you can name it “mmdCiteKey.txt” and enter this content: Open your finder, click Shift+CMD+G (in Menu: Go > Go to Folder) and go there: Here is how we will be able to Alt+CMD+C the cite key in MMD format: The output should look like this:īibDesk has a neat feature called Templates. In BibDesk, go to Preferences > Templates. Click the small + Button on the bottom right and double click the red words to add a new file. Your result should look like this:īy now, from within BibDesk, you can just go to Edit > Copy As > Template > mmdCiteKey or you right click an article and choose Copy Using Template > mmdCiteKey. If this is fine for you and you use your mouse more often than you use your keyboard, go with the right click option. Everyone else who wants to be really fast, follow me one more step.

#USING BIBDESK MAC#

Go to you Mac System Preferences (click the Apple on the top left and then Preferences). Go to Keyboard > Shortcuts and pick App Shortcuts on the bottom left of the list. Click the + button and find the BibDesk application. For the menu title enterĪnd for the Keyboard Shortcut press ALT+CMD+C. You can even select multiple authors, it will automatically insert all of them like: Paste it anywhere with CMD+V and enjoy your output: Now go to BibDesk, click on an article and press ALT+CMD+C. I’ve built multiple templates for all kind of purposes: inline citations, append, prepend, everything that improves your workflow is worth it. Just go the folder with the templates and create new files.Bibtex is the reference manager for Latex. I have used it for 20 years, I have written over 100 papers with it, and I think it works really well.

Using bibdesk