Mendeley: free. windows/mac/linux. scans PDFs and can make group libraries. JabRef: free. windows/mac/linux. The program I use. Organizes references and export refs to LaTeX documents. BibDesk: free. mac only. iTunes style. Zotero: free. windows/mac/linux. Firefox extension that saves citations and can insert them into Word/OpenOffice docs. Zot2Bib: free. mac only. Firefox extension that links Zotero […]

I recently got the proofs back for an accepted manuscript and had to go about making sure the editors didn’t screw anything up when they typeset the text. One way I’ve done this in the past (idea via Gabrielle!) is to coerce a co-author into helping me read the entire manuscript. Backwards. One conspirator reads […]

I was having a look for graphical file difference viewers in order to get a quick view of the differences between two LaTeX files. One of the things I was looking for was a tool that could handle changed inversions or rearrangments, places where the text has changed both in content and position within the […]

One way to assess the microbial community structure in an environment is to use a ‘fingerprinting’ technique, like T-RFLP or ARISA, to interrogate the ‘species’ living there as determined from their 16S rRNA genes or some functional gene like amoA. Here’s an example of a T-RFLP electropherogram from sea ice: You can see that most […]

I wrote my last paper in LaTeX and the submitted file was named ‘paper_v26’. Various other files with similar names are floating around and it is a chore to keep up with which is the latest version when they are split between two computers and three operating systems. For my thesis I decided to make […]