Reference manager

Draft

Definition

A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item with sufficient details to uniquely identify the item. Unpublished writings or speech, such as personal communications, are also sometimes cited. Citations are provided in scholarly works, bibliographies and indexes

Bibliographic management and citation formatting are central to this.

See also:

• the citation entry (for formats)
• the citation index article that discusses systems that do both social reference management and citation search etc.
• the literature review entry that may help you dealing with references :)

Formats and Tools

Popular data formats

BibTex

• Comes with free tools, well integrated with LaTex

Example:

@Book{WENGER87,
 keywords =     "education, AI",
 author = 	 "Wenger, E.",
 title = 	 "Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems",
 publisher = 	 "Morgan Kaufmann",
 year = 	 1987,
 address =	 "Los Altos, CA 94022"
}

• See the Wikipedia BibTeX page

EndNote

• Most popular commercial format (binary)

RefMan

• Uses symbolic *.ris format
• Next popular commercial format

RefWorks

• Commercial on-line service (allows sharing).
• See the Wikipedia RefWorks page

There are more formats ...

Individual Reference/Bibliography managers

A reference manager is a tool to manage references.

Local software

• JabRef (Freeware)

• CiteProc. This may become part of Open Office.

• Bibliographix (Small version is free, combines reference management, information retrieval and Idea Manager in a single application.

• Endnotes, Reference Manager (commercial)

Web-based software

• Most specialized vendors of academic digital publications allow to bookmark and export references in various formats. Also, you can tell google.scholar's preferences to add an export button.

Social reference managers

Such social software systems allow users to share references.

• Connotea is probably the most popular system. “Saving references in Conntoea is quick and easy. You do it by saving a link to a web page for the reference, whether that be the PubMed entry, the publisher's PDF, or even an Amazon product page for a book. Connotea will, wherever possible, recognise the reference and automatically add in the bibliographic information for you. In Connotea you assign keywords (or 'tags') to your references. These can be anything you like, and you can use as many as you like, so there's no more need to navigate complicated hierarchies of folders and categories. Connotea shows you all the tags you've ever used, so it's easy to get back to a reference once you've saved it.” ([1])

• WIKINDX is a free bibliographic and quotations/notes management and article authoring system designed either for single use (on a variety of operating sytems) or multi-user collaborative use across the internet. As opposed to Connotea, you likely want to install your own server for your organization (PHP/MySQL-based)

• refBASE. Web-based, platform-independent, multi-user interface for managing scientific literature & citations.

• RefWorks (Wikipedia page) is a commercial service

• LibraryThing free for 200 books. Collaborative features, Organizing with tagging, groups. Nice tool !

The advantage of using a social reference manager is that you can share tagged references. This will allow participants to follup new leads. And of course, you always can export.

Citation indexes

A citation index is an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which documents cite which other documents.

See the Citation index article which will explain this technology.

Other tools

• WebCite is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future.

• social bookmarking allow people to share links.

• Some portalware may include reference management tools (but this needs checking). Certainly, one could abuse a links manager, but it's not the same.

Educational use

• Support for reference gathering activities in project-oriented teaching
• (Teacher) preparation of reading lists
• Scaffolding of thesis work (i.e. profit from the collective intelligence within recent social software systems like citation indexes)

Links

Software

• Bibliophile. “Bibliophile was founded by Mark Grimshaw (Wikindx), Matthias Steffens (RefBase) and Daniel Pozzi (PHPBibMan) in 2004. Our goal is to promote collaboration between developers and end-users of bibliographic databases. (See the projects page)”

Citation Format overviews

• Bibliographic Styles from OpenOffice.org
• Wikipedia Citation

APA Format

See citation

References

• Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott (2005). Social Bookmarking Tools (I) - A General Review, D-Lib Magazine, April 2005, Volume 11 Number 4. HTML