PERRLA

[Merlin]

I started using it last night and got through about a third of my first paper in a couple of hours. While it's still too early to have a serious impression of the tool, I can attest that it is far quicker and easier to set up a new paper once you get it set up, and it takes care of all the important stuff like the title page, table of contents, footnotes, and references/citations. The outlining system is interesting but I didn't end up using it for this paper. I haven't played around with the research tool or any of the other stuff yet.

I normally use citefast for citation autogeneration, but since the first two sections of the paper don't require citations I haven't had much of a chance to play around with PERRLA's citation engine. I'll have more chance to do so once I get to section 3.

Have you not used Word for all of that?  I used it and it did all of that for me as well.

I used Word for all my undergrad writing and I used citefast to create my references for which I created my citations manually. My intention was to use Word for all my grad school writing as well, but since Perrla is recommended and I could test drive it for free, I figured why not? It isn't taking me any longer to create my papers than it would if I used Word directly. In fact, it is simplifying all the configuration and automating a lot of the manual steps I had to take with Word, which is nice. Is it worth an annual subscription fee for someone who already owns a copy of MS Word? Based on what I've seen so far, I don't think so, but once I get further into the tool and start to use the research functionality, for example, my opinion may change. Right now it is a nifty tool that saves me a bit of time, but not enough to spend money on it.

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Does PERRLA pull citations from Google Scholar?

For those writing a thesis, dissertation, or anything else that will require an enormous number of references, manually entering them in Word will be tedious and slow. I purchased EndNote because it pulls references from Google Scholar and formats them. EndNote is also better for organizing a large number of references. The problem with the software is that it's not user-friendly. So, I'm looking for alternatives.

I'm passing familiar with EndNote, but I don't know if it works the same way or not. I've read reviews where people favorably compare Perrla to EndNote and Mendeley, so I assume it does some similar stuff.

I know Perrla handles all the reference and citation management, including annotations, formatting, and tracking (including pointing out when references are included but not used and ensuring you do not create a citation for an absent reference). I also know that Perrla has a citation database that allows you to create and cross-reference massive reference libraries for use in dissertations and thesis'. As yet I haven't had a need to play around with those features so I can't offer a comparison yet.

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In addition to the manual entry, I've found the Word doesn't properly format APA citations for some types of sources. It's fine for books and journal articles, but seems to be off for webpages and videos (though perhaps I'm just using it wrong).

Merlin, I'm anxious to hear what your experience is with PERRLA.

I found mistakes with Word's built-in reference and citation tools as well, which is why I always used an external reference manager and created the citations manually myself. I am interested to see if Perrla does a better job. From what I've seen in the videos it appears to work well and supposedly understands how to reference pretty much any type of source (like 2000 different types) where Word only handles the common ones.