Reference manager
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 Unpublished writings or speech, such as personal communications, are also sometimes cited.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 :)
Tools
Individual Reference/Bibliography managers
A reference manager is a tool to manage references.
- Local software
- Web-based software
- Most specialized vendors of academic digital publications allow to bookmark and export references in various formats.
Social reference managers
Such 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])
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.
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
- General
- Bibliographic Styles from OpenOffice.org
- Wikiepedia Citation
- APA