until our own provisional theory is saturated finally, the ultimate theory is established. That is, at the first step, we collect relevant papers/data then we constantly compare concepts from the papers/data we sensitize concepts, write memos, reflect, etc.

I don’t know if someone has ever talked about the similar thing before: I think when we do reading, especially scientific reading, we are actually doing something pretty similar to Grounded Theory. I’m glad you mentioned Grounded Theory, which is one of the key theories in qualitative research. Although I haven’t tried it personally, from what I saw in the video tutorials provided by the website, it seems that LiquidText can do memo-writing and stuff like that. I completely agree with you! And yes, I think LiquidText does more than comparisons. LiquidText is very interesting – export is better than the other two apps, IMO.ĭon’t forget the other annotation options for PDFs – there are dozens. Some macOS-version bugs were fixed, and an iOS/iPadOS app came to market. As a product, it seemed to be abandoned for a long time, then came back to life. I like Highlights, but unfortunately do not trust it. If you want to focus on one-off PDFs that do not need to be managed as a group, then Highlights is OK for this.

For me, MarginNote is unique in its ability to handle that. Personally, I have large corpuses of dual-language source texts comprising thousands of pages of text in deeply intertwined (cross-referenced) documents.

I have them all, and prefer MarginNote - though it has some weird and frustrating interface issues.īacking up to the beginning though – the question is what’s your use case? Are you taking notes for academic research? For personal records? Something else? If you are taking notes on a corpus of PDFs that are related to one-another, and want to bring in web-resources into the notes then MarginNote is very good for this. Hmmm, MarginNote, LiquidText, Highlights are not suddenly new – they’ve all been around for several years.

Goodnote vs. marginnote