best way to use links for references?

It’s great to see how many different ways you can use links in DevonNote. But all the choices leave me a little bewildered, so I’d like advice from you experts on the best way to use links to help me reference my DevonNotes for a book I’m writing.

Here’s the scenario: I have three kinds of DevonNote files: sources (mostly interview transcripts, some archival research), notecards (tidbits of information drawn from the sources), and book chapters. The book text will need footnotes to the original sources. What I want to do is put a link in each notecard back to the source (i.e. the interview or archive) it comes from. I guess that would just be an index line on each card that names the source file.

Likewise, when I click on a link the book chapter (a text link, I guess), I want it to take me back to the notecard the info came from. That way, when it’s time to make footnotes, all I have to do is click on the link in the book text and it’ll take me back to the the notecard. Then I can click on the link in the notecard, and presto! it takes me back to the original source, which I can then make into a footnote.

Here’s an example: Say I have an interview with Andy Warhol – that’s a source. From that interview, I create a notecard. (“My first encounter with soup cans happened when I was 11 years old.”) Then I have a line in the book that says “When he was trying to find a way to represent America’s industrial culture, Warhol thought back to the time when he was 11 years old and was trapped under a collapsing pile of soup cans in a grocery store.” I want to be able to link those three items so I can quickly find the source. (And no, that example is made up – the book isn’t about andy warhol or anything close.)

I’m probably going to make at least 2000 notecards and about 200 source files. Given the great variety of linking styles available in DevonNote (not DevonThink), what method would y’all advise me to use? Also, does this sound like an efficient info organizing system (source files, notecard files, chapter files, etc)? I’d welcome any suggestions. And because I’m pretty dense when it comes to all this, I’d really appreciate it if you could write your suggestion in step by step form (e.g. “step 1…, step 2…” maybe even using that silly example above) rather than just telling me which linking style to use. Thanks so much for any help!

I am not totally sure to get it. I however wonder if the couple of blog posts I wrote a while back on bibliographical references in Devonthink (I do realise you use DevonNotes) could be of assistance. You should be able to find them at

venier.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_v … chive.html

Thanks – that’s a very clever way to compile a bibliography, and I’ll use it. I guess for references, you’d also link each source card to the bibliography card (the blank one) that it came from? If so, what kind of link would be best?

I’m curious to know what reference/biblio procedures others use with Devon, too. I learn a lot by hearing how others handle these situations.

I usually create a link to the short version of the reference say (Venier, Pascal. 1997). For this purpose, I simply create a link using the “make a link” function. This allows to make the most of the wiki like dimension of Devonthink. I have never tried DevonNote, but I suppose this should also be working with it.