Bibliography Management Software
Posted on August 28th, 2009 by Niket
I write papers in either LaTeX or MS Word. With the former, I use BibTeX to insert references, and Endnote with the latter. Since my post-doc, I have been using Endnote for managing references since the references are well categorized and it has decent search capabilities. Moreover, I could directly export bibliographic information from the Web of Science database.
I recently reinstalled windows on my laptop and the Endnote software cannot be installed since I don’t have the license anymore. I looked into some free reference management softwares and narrowed down to a couple: Zotero and Mendeley.
Have you or do you know of anyone who has used either of these softwares? Do you have any recommendations?
In a tangential sort of way, you might want to try a social bookmarking site for research publications - http://www.bibsonomy.org/
and a related software that works in conjunction - http://www.miresoft.net/citesmart/ - costs $15
“It nicely integrates with Word and builds a bridge between web-based tools like BibSonomy or Connotea. It is easing the way to takeover the data from web application and it is able to produces references in various formats for articles written in Word. In this way, it allows to easily write scientific articles and supports the scientific work of researchers. “
Try Biblioexpress, it is similar to Endnote. See my blog post on this,
http://giridharmadras.blogspot.com/2009/02/research-tools-for-collaboration.html
I like Zotero.
But Thompson (owners of WoS and Endnote) are trying to shut it down, using extremely underhand tactics. I’ve never used Endnote since I do all my writing in LaTeX.
JabRef is a great software I have used, which you insert things easily. It works great on Linux, but I think it is platform independent.
Niket -
I’ve written papers with both Zotero and Mendeley, and I’m now working as a representative for Mendeley.
Truly, they both work very well, and the main difference between them is that Zotero works as a Firefox add-on, which I was never comfortable with, while Mendeley is a stand alone app. The automatic data extraction and file organization that Mendeley offers is one of their best features.
If you give it a try and have any questions, feel free to email me or send me a tweet @mrgunn.