[OS X TeX] MLA-style Template

[David Messerschmitt]

Regarding a reference manager, I have found Refworks.com to be a valuable resource. It stores a database of references organized in folders, and both imports and exports references in various formats including bibtex, word, etc. So you can keep one "universal" reference database that can be used seamlessly in various places.

My university licenses the site (most do), and Google scholar can be configured to export references to my refworks account -- that is a good way to capture references without any typing, although sometimes a little cleanup is needed following the capture.

Another cool idea is to share a refworks account with collaborators, so you are keeping a joint database accessible to all.

I am sure that others have their fav system, e.g. Endnote.

-dave

On Mar 30, 2010, at 10:29 PM, Alan Munn wrote:

> 
> On Mar 31, 2010, at 1:16 AM, Richard J Benish wrote:
> 
>>> On Mar 30, 2010, at 11:24 PM, Richard J Benish wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I've been looking for an MLA-style template for a research paper that should include not only works cited, but also an annotated bibliography.
>>>> 
>>>> I've found fragments of what I need but I can't figure out how to get them to work together.
>>>> 
>>>> What I would really like to find (and I know must exist somewhere) is an archive (folder) that contains a sample document and whatever style files are needed so that I can immediately open the thing and start substituting the template text for my text. In other words a totally painless and functional template.
>>>> 
>>>> Does anyone know where I might find one?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> I don't know of such a magical folder, but the biblatex-mla package supports the annotation field in your bibtex database and can be used to generate annotated bibliographies.  Biblatex also supports multiple bibliographies easily, so if your works cited and your annotated bibliography are different you should be able to have both in the same document.
>>> 
>>> Alan
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks Alan. This is one of the fragments that I have found. Presently I don't have time to figure out how to use Bibtex, so I'm not sure how to take out only the part I need.
> 
> Especially with bibdesk as your reference manager, working with bibtex isn't that hard.  Have you never created a bibliography in latex at all before?  If you have, then getting an annotated bibliography isn't that hard to do.
> 
>> 
>> Since I'm in a bit of a hurry to get going on it, I've brought my text into a Word file. I'd much rather do the work in LaTex. Clunky as Word is in its various ways, it's so much easier to figure out for this kind of situation.
>> 
>> Frankly, I find it frustrating that this situation exists. As long as it does, I suppose LaTex will retain only a kind of "cult" following of geeky types. I wish I were enough of a geek to happily tinker out the template I need. But alas, I am not.
> 
> But I don't think there's a lot of tinkering to be done.  But if you mean typing references manually into your source document, then, yes, LaTeX isn't good for that.  But even with Word it would make sense to learn to use a reference manager so that you don't have to keep retyping all your references.
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alan Munn
> amunn at gmx.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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David Messerschmitt
Roger Strauch Professor Emeritus
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of Californa at Berkeley
    and
Visiting Professor
Helsinki University of Technology
Software Business Laboratory
   and
Visiting Researcher
SETI Institute




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