I’ve whittled away quite a bit of time trying to optimize my workflow for getting started on new research projects. Finding a good reference manager is a big, big part of that optimization. Many, many of my colleagues use Mendeley, which allows you to organize your articles into project subfolders, provide links to the PDFs, cite the papers as you write in Word and Google Docs, and add annotations. After a recent departmental workshop on using Mendeley, a pal and I were discussing that one of the main limitations to any reference manager is generating a project-specific annotated bibliography. This post is the outcome to some troubleshooting resulting from that conversation.

For projects past, I’ve tended to just make a new text document for each project in which I take brief summarizing notes on relevant papers. However, given that many of the papers I read are relevant to multiple projects, this quickly got to be redundant. Most reference managers allow you to take notes within the entry for a given source, but there needs to be an additional step in order to aggregate these notes to a common reference document for a given project.

Bring in LaTeX, an extremely powerful system for generating high quality text documents. One of my most cherished features of writing in LaTeX is being able to seamlessly and automatically cite references using the package biblatex. While there is a bit of a learning curve involved and a few (surmountable) barriers to implementing it full time (more on that later), it’s incredibly useful and I’m trying to transition to using it full time for all major writing projects. For the purposes of this post, however, you don’t actually need to know anything about LaTeX to be able to use it to generate an annotated bibliography.

Biblatex employs various citation styles - APA is the standard style preferred in my field, for example. The one of interest is the “reading” style, which is specifically intended for generating annotated bibliographies in LaTeX. The “reading” style crucially allows the user to print the contents of the field “annotation.”

Without getting too hot and heavy into less important details, here’s the basic workflow for taking notes in Mendeley, and creating an automated annotated bibliography in LaTeX using the reading style in biblatex:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=reading,abstract=false,file=false,annotation=true]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{/YOUR/PROJECT/PATH/project1.bib}

\title{Project: DBS Patient Controllers}
\author{Annotated Bibliography} % fill this in if you want to specify your name; you could also include a subtitle if you want
% \date{} % activate this if you don't want to include the date

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\nocite{*} % this means include everything (*) in the .bib file in the final bibliography, but don't cite it in the text

\printbibliography % this, rather intuitively, prints the bibliography
\end{document}