Erik Norvelle, creator of TextCite. PHOTO: Manuel Castells

A PhD student of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Navarra has created TextCite, a pioneering and free software that saves, organizes and allows commenting on textual quotations from books, articles or other writings for use in the production of scientific or academic publications.

"Its entire structure and capabilities are intended to facilitate the task of researcher who is preparing articles, thesis and other specialized works," explains Erik Norvelle, who invested three months in developing the first version. "This application," he adds, "replaces the paper cards with digital ones, so that more information can be kept about the citations: data about the book, the author, issue page, translation, comments... It also allows them to be retrieved more quickly and easily.

An innovative categorization system

According to him, an important contribution of the program is the categorization system: "It gives you the option of defining a tree of categories that correspond to a area of knowledge; you can then associate one or more categories to each card. In this way, when writing a article or a section of the thesis , you only have to click on the desired category to obtain a list of all the texts that make reference letter to that field. Moreover, the cards can be exported to PDF and Word for printing, studying and commenting by hand".

TextCite is also intended to work with other programs, especially reference managers such as EndNote, RefWorks, and BibTeX. In turn, it enables the insertion of textual citations with the codes required by a given management reference program.

"It currently has 4,020 'users' - people who have used the program more than three times - around the world. It is quite popular in Brazil and there are more than 200 in Spain," points out PhD student at Philosophy.

Interview on 98.3 Radio with Erik Norvelle: