This is a plugin for Zotero which sets up better (hence the name) citation keys for every item in your database. Follow the installation instructions here.
If people want a guide to how to get a lot out use and goodness out of Zotero, please email me and I will comply. I have tried all of the referencing managers, Zotero is the one for me, I will not apologise. If you don't use Zotero, you're bang out of luck, although I know a similar (and slightly more swish) system is already inbuilt for Papers ( look, the Ulysses blog even have a tutorial for it - traitors), but I don't want anything to do with Papers because Zotero is beautifully, charmingly ugly, and that's the way I like it. This is how to set up the same system for yourself: I have named this system Zotero/BetterBibTeX/zotpick-applescript/Service, because that is what it is made of and I'm sorry, I can't be called upon to be imaginative on demand.
It's also so portable that when I reinstalled macOS recently, it took me fifteen minutes to set it up again. When it comes to academic references, I use a reasonably complex system which is, however, extremely flexible, sits in the background, and doesn't disturb anyone. I've only made minor aesthetic changes to Ulysses' default preferences, as well as one very important non-aesthetic change which I will get to in the next section. Ulysses is a beautiful Markdown word processor and project manager which has the inner workings of a really powerful writing tool like Scrivener, but stays well out of the way when I write.
We do live in the future.įirst, I write my work in Ulysses. To that end, this guide - as much for my own future benefit as anyone else's - lists everything that is required to allow me to transform what is on the left into what is on the right with a click of a goddamn button. As a bonus, this workflow turns all your citations into automatic references according to whatever style you happen to be using (Chicago, MLA, APA, MHRA, anything), with all of the appropriate ibids. She is busy and does not have time for my shit. Over the last few months, as I've been working on my PhD, I've set up a workflow to convert my writing (in everyone's favourite simple markup language, Markdown), as if by magic, into Word documents which I can email to my supervisor, without having to explain to her that Markdown is great, really, if you only tried it you'd see. Updated for compatibility with Pandoc version 2.1.1!