General Mac software discussions: MAC software for Writing Papers

Bibliography-specific software

What you ought to be looking for is bibliography specific software or a bibliography-intensive word processor. Both exist for the Mac; support of Chicago/Turabian style is a little harder to find than APA or some of the others, but they exist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY SOFTWARE:

EndNote:
http://www.endnote.com/ENMac.asp
the most-used one, at least around our university; can pull bibliography data off library & internet databases and auto-format them appropriately).

BookEnds:
http://www.sonnysoftware.com/
The primary direct competitor to EndNote.

Scholarword:
http://scholarword.com/chicago-style.htm (Chicago/Turbian specific)
or
http://scholarword.com/pro.html (all the styles in one app, in case your requirements change)
This is the new boy on the block; not sure how good it is, but it's cheap compared to the others.

Sente:
http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/introduction.html
Never tried it, but comes recommended by friends as easy to use, but harder to integrate the output into some word processing & DTP applications...

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WORD PROCESSORS FOR YOUR SPECIFIC USEAGE:

Mellel:
For scholar-specific word processors with bibliography hooks to the most common bibliography software listed above, multi-language aware (including Hebrew), look at:
http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html

Nisus:
Powerful, for the geek who knows GREP, fast, multilanguage aware, bibliography formatting in the app, and ties to the most common bibliography apps, take a look at Nisus Writer Pro
http://www.nisus.com/pro/

Of NOTE:
If your research is apt to include multiple languages (including dead languages), make sure you pick a word processor that supports tagging text for a specific language (i.e. - this paragraph in German, that one in English) AND has a multi-language spell-checker, so the spell checker will correctly check everything instead of flagging all the "other language" stuff each time you do spell-check.

I tend to write/edit in a raw text editor (BBEdit - http://www.barebones.com/ ) and then import the text into a full-fledged DTP program (typically Quark, but sometimes FrameMaker [think anything over 1000 pages] or Adobe Indesign) to stylize it for publishing the final "print" versions. I do this to stay concentrated on the main thoughts while writing instead of worrying about layout & document flow, plus I found out eons ago that while application-specific and application-version-specific documents come and go, text files live forever. Only down-side to this approach is that the text editor, while lightening fast (and capable of doing GREP edits across 1000's of files at once), doesn't support multi-language spell checking in the same document.

PS - most of these apps have demo or time-limited versions you can download and try for yourself, so you can try-before-you-buy.

Cheers,
=-= The CyberPoet