During most of my bachelor, I’ve used paper and pen or pencil to take notes. Halfway my second minor [Okasys], though, I switched to my laptop and LaTeX, which I preferred, because typing is faster than writing and reworking my notes into a halfway decent summary usually proved too time-consuming with hand-written notes. Admittedly, though, although reorganizing my notes became easier with LaTeX, I still didn’t really get to the finished summary stage, because I’m still way too obsessive-compulsive about the whole thing, most of the time. Now, since I figured I use my blog for all sorts of notes, I can just as well let WordPress and Google do some of the organizing for me, while taking notes for my present course. I just have to be a bit more careful about copyright issues (but, if the need strikes, I can always set a post to private).

There are various WordPress plugins for keeping track of academic references. I’m now experimenting with papercite [documentation. From the feature list, I was more interested in the AcademicPress plugin, but the former seems te be more actively developed. However, I’m thinking of switching to a simple footnotes and/or endnotes plug-in, since my use of papercite so far actually doesn’t include maintaining biography files shared by more than one post, and papercite doesn’t support author-year citations anyway. I’m surrounding the text with [bibshow file=custom://data][/bibshow] shortcodes, which references a BibTeX biography stored in a custom field called papercite_data.