The following software packages and tools may be of use to you.

Zotero notes/bibliography software
Mendeley notes/bibliography software
Antconc concordance software
ARC journal listings

Zotero

Zotero is a free, open-source software tool for managing notes, bibliographic data, and research materials produced by George Mason University in Virginia. Zotero allows you to download bibliographic data from JSTOR and library websites, take notes on those sources, and create footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies in a variety of styles, including Chicago and MLA.

Features include:

• One-click download of bibliographic info from library catalogs and websites
• Associate and store notes and files (e.g., PDFs, images, audio, video) with source data
• Tagging and full-text search of notes and bibliographic data
• One-click switching between notes and bibliographic styles (e.g., convert MLA-style notes to Chicago and vice versa)
• Free data storage on Zotero servers that allows you to sync your notes between multiple machines

Zotero’s conformance to styles, however, is not perfect. For example, it does not include all the possible formats for various types of sources, especially internet sources or books with funky publication histories, although it handles ordinary books and all journal articles flawlessly. So generally some manual cleaning up of the final notes and bibliography is necessary, but the software does about 95% of the work for you.

Zotero comes with plugins for MS Word, LibreOffice, OpenOffice Writer, and NeoOffice. It operates either from within the Firefox browser, or as a standalone application with extensions for Chrome and Safari. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The iPad app Zotpad allows you to edit and add notes to sources and sync to the Zotero server, but does not allow you add sources to your library.

Download Zotero for free from www.zotero.org. The iPad app Zotpad is available for $10 at Apple’s Appstore.

Mendeley

At some point in your academic life you’re going to need a software platform to organize research, and you will have to make a decision about which research-management tool (e.g., EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley) is most appropriate for you. Zotero is currently the most popular with PhD students in English at U of T, but Mendeley may be better for you depending on what kind of research support you’re looking for. Like Zotero, Mendeley is free to download, and is a great tool to manage notes, bibliographic data, and research materials. It also automatically extracts document details from academic papers and websites, allows you to organize and search your research (and to add notes and tags to research items), and synchronizes your research collection across multiple platforms. Finally, like Zotero, Mendeley provides an automatic back-up of all of your materials online.

Where Zotero has the edge is in data extraction: Zotero provides automatic detection and support for a wide range of library and other institutional proxy servers (meaning you don’t have to log into, for instance, JSTOR, to connect to an item extracted by Zotero from that server), and it allows you to generate multiple items from a search-list within these archives. Its plug-ins for adding bibliographic data to other platforms like MS Word are also superior (Mendeley, like Zotero, has an MS Word plug-in that allows you to import bibliographic data in the style you choose, but it can be buggy—particularly for in-text citations). If you’re mainly looking for something to collect, manage, and export bibliographic data, you should probably use Zotero.

Where Mendeley shines is in its management of PDFs, allowing you to highlight text, add notes, and even attach in-document annotations, thereby providing the kind of document mark-up usually only available with an expensive program like Adobe Professional. It also does a better job than Zotero when importing PDFs and pulling out their citational meta-data (importing saved PDFs into Zotero is, in comparison, remarkably cumbersome). Mendeley’s interface is also, from an admittedly subjective viewpoint, prettier and more intuitively laid out than Zotero’s. As noted previously, Mendeley’s Word plug-in is buggy, but it can be by-passed by using Mendeley’s drag-and-drop citation feature instead. It also has a surprisingly useful feature to rename source files, thereby getting rid of the usually unwieldy file names given to PDFs by digital libraries. Finally, Mendeley is a better standalone application, as much of Zotero’s best features are only available within the Firefox web browser. Therefore, if document mark-up and collection management is more valuable to you than data extraction and citation import/export, Mendeley is the better choice.

You can download Mendeley from http://www.mendeley.com/

Antconc concordance software

AntConc is a free, multi-platform tool for carrying out textual analysis and corpus linguistics research. You can enter a text into AntConc and the software will tell you all the words, phrases, and common expressions (N-grams_ that appear in the text, where they are located, their frequency, and collocates of words (words that appear near other words).

The documentation is not the greatest, but once you figure out what the software does, it is rather simple to use. It’s an extremely powerful and flexible tool.

Antconc runs on any computer running Microsoft Windows (tested on Win 98/Me/2000/NT, XP, Vista, Win 7),
Macintosh OS X (tested on 10.4.x, 10.5.x, 10.6.x), and Linux (tested on Ubuntu 10).

Antconc is available at http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html

Journal Rankings

The Australian Research Council provides a list of journals relevant to particular fields. In the past, ARC ranked journals, giving them grades from A+ through C (just like grad student grades), providing a rough guide to a journal’s reputation. Unfortunately, with the 2012 list, ARC stopped ranking them; now it’s just a list.

The list is huge since it covers all the fields, but with a bit of filtering, you can narrow down the list to merely broad topics like “literary studies” and “language studies.” Given its size and the broad nature of its fields (i.e., “literary studies”), it’s not all that useful in creating a list of journals but it’s a place to start.

The list from 2012 is here in both MS Excel and PDF formats: http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_2012/archive/era_journal_list.htm

Note that for each journal there are three field codes, FOR1, FOR2, and FOR3. Most journals cover multiple fields and which field is listed first is pretty much random. So you have to search/filter all three field columns to get all the journals that cover a particular field.