​Citation Managers like Bookends

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The manuscript for Christ the Tragedy of God is finally done. It took longer than I expected, which is pretty typical. Challenging for me was being away from research and writing for several years. In that time I had made various notes and drafts, so my task was corralling and stitching these notes together into a cohesive whole. Having all those notes and bits sounded advantageous, but it was maddening to constantly move, rewrite, cut, and shift things around as I tried to find the larger argument. Perhaps it’s just me and my synapses, the curse of technology, or having so many notes, but writing for me is a lot of working and re-working. It’s like sanding a table by hand, going over and over it with various sandpapers.

I realized just yesterday that I had done the bibliography incorrectly. Somewhere I had the idea that Routledge wanted a separate file for just the bibliography. I realized my error yesterday in going through the author’s guidelines. But it wasn’t a problem at all because I had used Bookends. A citation manager allows you to have a reference and resource library (I have 832 items, personally), and to format your citations at the end. Using the one-two-three punch of Scrivener, Microsoft Word, and Bookends, I was able to export the chapters and temporary citations from Scrivener into Word (like most academic publishers, Routledge prefers the manuscript in Word), and then scan the chapters with Bookends to convert the temporary citations into endnotes, and place a bibliography at the end of each chapter. It took 15 minutes, tops.