selecting a reference management program
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General Information
General Information
Objectives: select the best reference management program FOR YOU Pre-requisites: prior use of a wordprocessing program and web browser Duration & Break: 1 hour Course Material: handout Delivery Style: lecture and handout
Follow-on courses: EndNoteEndNote WebMendeleyZoteroWeb Skills for Researchers: Web of Knowledge and Scopus
What are Reference Mangement Programs?
Special examples of databases: you could use Excel or Access if you wanted to.
References may be used to document any kind of information source. For example:
Print material: books, journal articles... Audiovisual: TV, radio, film, podcast... Music: CD, MPG... Images: paintings, drawings, photos... Web pages
If your discipline requires complicated rules for reference layout it may be tricky (occasionally impossible) to find an output style which will satisfy the requirements.
ALWAYS produce a small sample and show it to your supervisor, publisher etc. for approval before doing a large amount of work.
Your supervisor is also the right person to ask for advice about discipline-related protocols such as anonymisation of any personal data you have collected. Don't leave all this until the week before you are due to submit your work!
Too Much Choice!!
Possibilities include:
o MS Word’s in-built bibliography feature - free as part of Wordo EndNote Desktop - £89o EndNote Web - Free for Cambridge University memberso Reference Manager (Windows only) - £180o Procite (Windows only) - £180o Zotero - free to download open source (premium features charged for)o Mendeley - free to download open source (premium features charged)o Papers - £30 No citation feature. o BibTeX - free, but complicated to learn/integrate with documento Qiqqa – free “lite” version, charged premium version.
Multi-Stage Process
o Collecting references
o Reading the material (I hope!)
o Organising your thoughts and drawing conclusions from your reading
o Citing into a document which represents your own original work.
Programs are not equally good at handling each stage
Follow the herd
If everyone else in your department uses a particular program, you may be well advised to do the same.
o Peer assistance.
o Ease of exchanging files.
o Output is likely to conform to local standards.
Where are your references??
Somewhere in cyberspace?
Somewhere on your computer, but you don’t know where?
In your documents folder?
Does it matter?
Yes!o If you can’t be sure whether important data is backed
up or not.o If you CAN’T back up your data because you can’t find
it.o If you can’t access your data because someone else’s
servers are down.o If you over-write your data because you are confused
about which is the most recent version.o If your partner over-writes your data because they are
confused!o If someone gets a court order to read your data.
MS Word
• Little ability to harvest references from online sources: must be typed in.
• Reference layout can be changed without re-typing by using layout styles
• No facility to modify layouts.
• References are stored inside your normal word documents and backed up with them.
EndNote Desktop
• Excellent ability to harvest online references. Can be complicated to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping using output styles
• Output styles can be edited (GUI interface).
• References should be stored in the documents folder, but the unwary user can select an obscure (and dangerous!) location or get muddled and only save part of the file.
EndNote Desktop
• Excellent ability to harvest online references. Can be complicated to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping using output styles
• Output styles can be edited (GUI interface).
• References should be stored in the documents folder, but the unwary user can select an obscure (and dangerous!) location or get muddled and only save part of the file.
EndNote Web
Excellent ability to harvest from online sources. Simple to set up.
Reference layout can be changed without retyping using output styles
No facility for user to modify output styles
References stored on Thomson Reuters’ servers in the US
Reference Manager
• Excellent ability to harvest online references. Can be complicated to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping using output styles.
• Output styles can be modified by user.
• References should be in the documents folder but, as with EndNote desktop, it’s possible for a naïve user to set up a different location by mistake.
Zotero
• Excellent ability to harvest references online. Simple to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping using output styles.
• Only “power users” can modify output styles.
• References are stored inside the local Firefox preferences folder and also synched with Zotero servers, but this can be customised.
An unwary user might assume references are NOT stored on the local machine.
Legal References Unique difficulties because layout is very important but follows rules
which are hard to express in mechanical terms.
Most legal databases store references in free-format (untagged) form so can't be automatically downloaded and imported.
There is a project to develop a version of Zotero which can handle legal citations: see http://citationstylist.org/ This is still at an experimental stage.
Mendeley
• No online search option: mainly intended as a repository of PDF files discovered by other means.
• Perhaps the best option if you already have lots of stored article PDFs
• “Social” options give suggestions of papers which may be relevant to your work.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping using output styles.
• Only “power users” can modify output styles.
• References are stored inside the user’s Library directory, but synched to Mendeley’s servers
Qiqqa
• Online search options.
• OCR option for PDFs in the older image format
• Unique “topic analysis” suggests themes in papers
• “Brainstorm” to explore relationships between papers
• Reference layouts can be changed without retyping using output styles, but not many available yet.
• Only power users can modify styles: no GUI interface
• References are stored inside the user’s Library directory, but can be synched to Qiqqa’s servers
• Windows only
BibTeX
Not relevant to search of online sources. Reference layout can be changed using
output styles. Users can modify output styles References are stored as a plain text file in
the documents folder Really only useful if you plan to use LaTeX,
although some of the GUI packages use BibTeX format to store reference data
GIGO!
http://www.vtstutorials.co.uk
Quality Control Quality Control
Free Internet tutorials on a range of subject areas produced by a consortium of UK universities to give students the skills needed to evaluate information sources
A user with minimal computer skills, but good, fast & accurate typing may be safest with MS Word. The best choice if few useful references are available to harvest online and you need to enter a lot of your own annotation (e.g. critical edition of 18th century letters).
Someone in a department where everyone uses BibTeX may get on well by fitting in with the rest.
If you enjoy experimenting with gadgets, you may be happy using a mix of Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and Qiqqa.
In a discipline which requires complex reference layouts, EndNote desktop may be the only viable option.
If you are concerned about the dominance of Thomson Reuters in publication analysis you may want to avoid products from their stable.
If you are a spy you do not want the CIA to look at your reading list!
Quality ControlNo one product is right for everyone
Features of some of the packages
Social Aspects
“People like you read...”
Once you have a significant library of PDFs that you regularly sync online Mendeley will begin to suggest other papers that may be relevant to your work.
Mendeley learns topics that are relevant to you
Qiqqa: document window
Qiqqa: brainstorms explore connections
Will automatically convert web pages to PDF
Scholar contains internal data about US legal cases in HTML format. Zotero will save the citation information but currently only Qiqqa will save the page as a PDF and add to your local database
Zotero has particular strengths for legal citations
Search and download legal cases via Google Scholar: but sadly only for the US courts at present.