InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by mknjlaw on 2010/05/26 12:12

I know I sound like a broken record but why cannot someone create an Authorities or Sources form like the ones in ndxnotes and notescribe which then could be related to an outline level? Trust me I could do this in a heart beat in Access but I need the outline metaphor to categorize my research results with as much granularity as possible an Access just does not do that. InfoQube, I guess, is incredibly potent but bordering on useless for academics or any one else who needs to be able to create bibilographies or otherwise give credit to authors whose work is being cited or used.

Comments

Hi Mitchel,

You started a few threads and posted regarding slightly different (but similar) matters/questions in Accessing bibliographic database within outline, and Sources of research... But I don't think you really followed up / gave a lot of feedback

I'm willing to help, but only if I'm sure you're truly interested in the answer. :)

To be able to give you a precise and satisfying answer, I need to know what exactly you want to do at his point (I could guess that it's the same as it was in February, but I can,t know for sure).

In any case It seems that there are several ways of achieving what you seem to be after and it would actually not be complicated at all. (Using either 1- the multiple parent feature, 2- a field which would have dropdown list taking it's info from various bibliographical fields but integrating them all in one, 3- a future feature which would involve semi-automatic parent assignment (see mantis #898), etc.

I'll wait for your answer here before going further.

Thanks

Armando,

Please go to this link and read the article on how to write a research paper. I have copied it below. Attached is the Sources Card and the Project Card, the latter contains the principles derived from research and the former the sources from which the principles were derived. Here is the link. The Sources Notes become children of the principles from which they were derived. The fields in the source notes are straightforward and the program lays them out in several different formats. I could not care less about APA format.

I want to read articles create an outline based on the principles derived from the article and attach a source form to each principle.

http://www.ndxcards.com/mycards.asp?id=4.

ndxCards TO WRITE A RESEARCH PAPER


	Begin by gathering source materials - books, magazines, periodicals, interviews, etc. Make a Source card for each item, and needed Author cards. As you read - use Summary / Paraphrase / Quotation note cards to take notes, and link them to Source / Author cards. If you did not make these cards earlier, you can do so now.	Begin outlining the paper using the Project feature - add headings & see where your notes will fit. As you discover gaps in the paper, do additional research / take more notes.	When your project outline looks ready for a draft - export into your word processor for editing. Your bibliography will be exported too.

Mitchell Kastner

Attorney at Law

95 Smith Road

Somerset, NJ 08873

(732) 873-9555

Hi Mitchel,

Thanks for the details.

[quote]

Attached is the Sources Card and the Project Card, the latter contains the principles derived from research and the former the sources from which the principles were derived. Here is the link. The Sources Notes become children of the principles from which they were derived. The fields in the source notes are straightforward and the program lays them out in several different formats. I could not care less about APA format.

[/quote]

I looked at your screeshots. All of that is easily done in IQ.

I could design a DB that does all that, and probably more. It's part of the DB that would be useful to design...

"When" is the question. Maybe for next week, if not all features are included.

I'd also like to see if downloading item/sources from a university library DB is a possibility for IQ etc.

This way IQ could almost become an EndNote replacement.

In any case -- again -- what is described in the ndxCards article is a extremely easy to achieve with IQ.

I'll show you the IQ correspondence with the ndxCards description, so you can try it yourself if you feel like it (but I'll probably work on it next week):

-- 1--

> Begin by gathering source materials - books, magazines, periodicals, interviews, etc.

[...]

>Make a Source card for each item, and needed Author cards.

Create :

(1)- A grid for sources -- each source would be an item (each source would be defined by a specific "source" or "reference" field). And authors would be added to a field with an auto list so it would be very very easy to define for each source-reference.

OR create :

1- A grid for sources -- each source would be an item (each source would be defined by a specific "source" or "reference" field).

2- and a grid for authors, with the relevant fields/columns... (Each author would be defined by a specific "author" field)

I would probably also create a form to quickly enter "source" data when sources are added using the "add item" dialog -- please see section --2--.

In this last case, to link sources to authors :

--> you'd just ctrl-drag&drop sources under their respective authors. Since an item can have multiple parents, it'd be easy for a source to have multiple author (...parents)

I personally very much like this option as it easily allows an article to be linked to several authors if needed, ... But the only problem with it at this point is that it's not as quick to assign multiple parents then to just copy/paste into 100 fields the name of a specific author. That until of course Pierre implements this Mantis suggestion :

898

Parent assignment from a pop-up list

Pierre another feature would be nice : a field which would concatenate all parents an item has (in a list, with comas, or whatever...). I'm sure that'd be easy to achieve with some SQL magic in the option section of a field. It would help a lot for bibliographical lists, or just for simple searches where a user wants to list all items have such or such parent (not just the main one but any one).

-- 2--

> As you read - use Summary / Paraphrase / Quotation note cards to take notes, and link them to Source / Author cards. If you did not make these cards earlier, you can do so now.

In IQ you can either :

1- In the main IQ window, open a grid (use the grid buttons, OR the View->grids menu, OR ctrl-shift-O and start typing the first letter + enter). Maybe would that be a general reference grid or note grid... That grid would contain those columns/field you need....and then start to add items as you find them. Press enter to create items. Press ctrl-enter to create a sub-item.

2- Use Win-C to invoke the the "Add item universal clipper", and clip almost any selected text and image, anywhere, and assign different fields to the clipped data (the dialog offers many options -- more to come) -- at the bottom, the clip can even contain information about where and when and by who it was clipped

3- Use Win-N to invoke the "Add item" dialog and just jot notes of your own and assign different fields to your data (the dialog offers many options -- more to come) -- at the bottom, the clip can even contain information about where and when and by who it was clipped

4- Right click in Firefox or IE and select "InfoQube : Copy Content" or "InfoQube : Create Link" to invoke the add item dialog, etc. Same as above.

THEN for each item -- to link material to specific sources, if needed -- you can either

1- Drag&drop notes /clipped Data, etc. to their respective sources (this seems like the easiest solution, especially if the above mentioned mantis issue is implemented)

2- Use a field (maybe called "BibliogDetails" or "SourceDetails" or whatever) that would fetch data from the "source grid" (using a simple SQL query) and fill the field with relevant info. This is also pretty easy to achieve, but means more redundancy (source info will be repeated for each item/note/web clip).

-- 3--

>Begin outlining the paper using the Project feature - add headings & see where your notes will fit. As you discover gaps in the paper, do additional research / take more notes.

Create a Project grid or whatever you want... Compose your paper... Add your notes using (ctrl)-drag & drop to the outline etc. Nothing complicated. You can even have the same note under different parents in the outline.

Use colors, different fonts, etc. to make things easier to see, etc.

Automate formatting for certain cells.

-- 4--

>When your project outline looks ready for a draft - export into your word processor for editing. Your bibliography will be exported too.

"Print" your project (ctrl-p)... Use one of the HTML export option or just use the WYSIWYG option. Right now that might be the weakest part as there are a few things that don't work as well as they should (bullets in WYSIWYG, icons in HTML sexport, etc.). But it all depends on the kind of export you're after.

One thing that can also be done in IQ is exporting according to specific templates -- i.e. : a Reference list formatted in the APA style or whatever seems like it would be pretty simple to do.

============

[quote=mknjlaw]

[/quote]

Most likely, lack of available time is the only reason that such an IQBase has not yet been created.

Hopefully, you post will spur interest by members of the IQ Community, perhaps even yourself...

If you need help setting this up yourself, do not hesitate to ask.

Check out -- link to nonexistent node ID 2011 --. I put a rough draft, per your info, and Armando's. Hopefully it will be a decent starting point.

Armando/Tom, and others, feel free to experiment; I imagine you can attach revised files, since it's a book page.

Looks good ! Thanks for doing that. I'll look at it this week. Can't say when as I have some stuff to finish first... But I will !