SERIOUS SOFTWARE FOR SCHOLARSHIP
One integrated environment for scholars,
authors, researchers, and editors.
Everything you need to think clearly,
work carefully, and publish with confidence.
Single click capture of virtually anything from the web—text and/or citations—in both structured bibliographic and unstructured full-text form, for instant citing or searching.
Search—from a simple double click to the most sophisticated—across millions of files, finding what matters in your notes, manuscripts, PDFs, DOCX files, saved web pages, and more.
Advanced tools for long-form writing—outlines, footnotes (even three series), indexes, cross-references, and style-compliant formatting, with chapters easily combined into manuscripts.
Cite sources with scholarly accuracy & control (citations fully contextualized & convertible between short-form & note formats), building a database for your entire scholarly career.
For more than four decades,
Nota Bene has helped scholars produce their best work and preserve it for the long term.
Nota Bene is a uniquely powerful system for academic research and writing, especially in ancient and modern languages. It can perform feats of data storage and retrieval that other apps can't even dream of. It effortlessly formats output to match the demands of specialist publishers.
NB and Orbis were indispensable to the research and writing that went into the nine other books I have authored or co-authored with my colleague Harvey Klehr. Historian colleagues ... think I’m a miracle worker. I’m not. I have NB and Orbis, and that is enough.
This book was prepared using Nota Bene's suite of academic software. These tools have been a pleasure to use and quite indispensable. I greatly appreciate the prompt and personal assistance I have received. Yours is the only software I have ever used that works the way my brain works and does exactly the things I want to do.
Collect sources, capture web content, import PDFs, and build your career-long citation library.
Summarize content, add quotes, make arguments, with everything linked to sources and documents.
Search and explore connections across your research and writing, with automatic attribution.
Compose with clarity using powerful writing and citation tools, with automatic formatting.
Export to DOCX or PDF and produce work to share with colleagues, editors, and publishers.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO AI
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NOTA BENE
TOOLS FOR THOSE WHO THINK FOR THEMSELVES
Nota Bene gives you access to all the data that matters to you—up to millions of texts gathered over the course of your career—as you browse the web, explore texts given you by colleagues, or write manuscripts of your own. Your data trove is:
Discoverable with either simple (just double click a word in your document) or highly sophisticated multi-term (with Boolean [AND, OR, and NOT] operators, wildcards, synonyms, and more) searches
Aware of meaningful semantic units/arguments (e.g., paragraphs, not just terms scattered throughout sources)
Focused on the specific texts that matter to your research—your reading notes, text captured from the web, all your previous manuscripts—or everything, all at once
Seen in full context, with full automatic sourcing—no plagiarizing—and rule-compliant dynamic citation/reference formatting
Displayed in a keyword-in-context concordance-style view that allows comparative reading of texts from disparate sources
Organized, as needed, by source, date, and “intensity” of match
Ready to be supplemented (in Nota Bene’s unique note-taking system) with your reflections, criticisms, commentary
A single mouse click is all it takes to bring any captured text (or your own commentary or comments) into your active document, with every (automatically sourced) text being properly attributed, automatically, building an ever expanding knowledge base.
It’s a tool designed for close, careful reading, so you can see things that nobody else does.
Nota Bene’s powerful applications follow the natural arc of your research personal workflow, from start to finish.
Nota Bene’s data magnet/web-data parser:
Nota Bene’s genre-defying data magnet gathers everything—texts and citations—you need.
Everything you capture becomes a building block for your use, expansion, and reflection:
Captured texts are ready for Nota Bene’s enhanced note-taking options that link everything together, seamlessly.
Nota Bene’s powerful search engine gives you the tools you need to explore new research pathways:
Sources and commentary are instantly searchable, the results elegantly presented, so that you can see what others missed.
Your documents are formatted and structured—precisely, with every detail handled automatically, so you don’t have to worry.
Simply select the desired style:
And choose from the supported document types:
Nota Bene will handle everything automatically:
With powerful and elegant document structuring (and restructuring):
Nota Bene effortlessly adheres to academic standards in the humanities and social sciences.
Page-layout and citation style can be changed to a different style with just a few keystrokes (even in-text citations to note style, and back again), all automatically, instantly (in seconds!), perfectly formatted, consistent with academic disciplines and publishers’ needs, without any user intervention required.
It’s never been easier to submit an article to a different journal requiring a different layout or citation style.
Everything—layout, numbering system, citation style—can be changed, in seconds, from one style/format to another!
Editors invariably take note of the smooth collaboration with Nota Bene authors.
They won’t need to spend even a minute checking for consistent citation format, with everything handled flawlessly—first (full form) vs. subsequent shortened form, never out of order, ibid., op. cit., etc., as required by style.
(How many manuscripts have you seen, even from university presses, where shortened subsequent forms actually precede the fuller form, because no adjustment was made after a last-minute edit? That will never happen with Nota Bene—contextualization is automatic as citations are added, deleted, and moved.)
Everything—headings (automatically numbered if required), block indented regions, notes (beginning on the page on which they were cited, and properly wrapped as necessary)—is handled reliably, saving countless hours of (often frustrating!) editorial work.
Editorial work is made effortless, Nota Bene already having taken care of the details, making your editors (and you!) happy.
Seamless and efficient collaboration with colleagues and publishers is at the heart of the Nota Bene vision.
Nota Bene documents are perfectly exported to DOCX format to send to collaborators and publishers. No academic collaborator and no publisher will be required to make formatting changes (document structure, including proper citation contextualization, is automatic and reliable).
And once the page proofs are returned, Nota Bene’s extensive indexing options (more powerful than you will find anywhere else) save countless hours in the tedious task of preparing the manuscript index. (Or indexes. Nota Bene supports any number of indexes—general, subject, authors [ancient and/or modern], without limit.)
Rich fexport options make sharing your work with others, and getting it published, effortless.
It works both ways—DOCX files are precisely imported AND enhanced with Nota Bene’s smart document structures not available in DOCX:
Nota Bene automatically detects an opened DOCX research document and guides the user through every section, suggesting heading level and corresponding body (and allowing for overrides).
Citations are faithfully converted, with references entered through Zotero simultaneously captured as native Nota Bene bibliographic records to allow subsequent fully automatic contextualization!
Even unstructured reference lists (in supported styles) can be converted into structured Nota Bene records
And all track-change markups and comments in documents returned from editors can be seamlessly reincorporated into your smarter original Nota Bene version, before being sent back in DOCX format.
Bring over everything you’ve already written, or been given by colleagues, while unlocking new research powers.
And when your texts are sophisticated enough that they pose a challenge even for your publisher, Nota Bene’s unique ability to create camera-ready copy of the most complex documents might mean the difference between abandoning your project (as originally conceived) and having it published (and without breaking the bank).
So there’s no reason to despair if you are working on a commentary on a medieval manuscript, with three independent sets of footnotes (each with distinct separator, numbering system, and format styles, as desired, for textual variants, commentary, and the like, properly and precisely formatted by Nota Bene at the bottom of each page), unparalleled cross-referencing options, and unique linguistic accent/modifiers found nowhere else in the texts.
Nota Bene’s powerful research and formatting options let you create the text, and then produce fine-tuned camera-ready PDF output, making it possible for your life’s work to see the light of day.
Nota Bene lets you create—publish!—complex critical texts that even publishers find daunting, ensuring that the world can see your work.
Built on decades of innovation
Nota Bene was the first program to (among many other innovations):
And it still offers research capabilities no other program even dreams of.
Nota Bene is built for careful thinking, rigorous research, and clear writing.
Better scholarship comes from better tools—tools that help you think more clearly, cite more accurately, and write with confidence.
No distractions. No surveillance. No data monetization. No ads.
Just software designed to support serious work.
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