A quick overview of the available reference managers (zotero,

mendeley, endnote)Jose Quesada

5-5-2010NOTE: reference managers change all

the time; this information may be obsolete by the time you read this.

Everytime metadata is manually re-entered a grad student cries.

-Howison

Advantages for you• Should be faster that doing things by hand

• Reformatting a paper for a different journal

• Never have to think 'where do I have last cited that paper... so I can copy-paste the reference’

• Removing a paragraph will remove the references too

• If you fix a typo on your db, it will fix the references on all papers that contain it

• Good for sharing papers and citations in a research group

Advantages long-term

• Metadata that travels with the paper. Will make papers easy to find and utilize

• Current tools are trying to do it ‘the hard way’:

– Scholar, Citeseer: Parsing author, title, etc out of the papers that we academics have in our homepages, and making them searchable for the rest of the word

– Mendeley: Parsing author, title, etc out the papers on your computer and make them searchable for you

Equilibrium: shareability vs. functionality

• Desktop reference managers– they live on the desktop

and integrate well with writing tools

• Social bookmarking systems (citeUlike, connotea)– they are webpages, like

delicious for academics

Is is technically possible?

Standards

Music: ID3

Papers: XMP

BibTeX

annotations

• When you highlight or add a note to a paper, it’s also metadata

• This is not likely to be shared

Soft peer review

Soft peer review

Google scholar

• Go to preferences

Advantages– rapid release cycle– Metadata stays in the

cloud– offers the best

‘facebook-like’ features– best social search– Innovative tools for

measuring impact: ReaderRank

– API– Annotations are included

• Disadvantages– Automatic recognition

often fails, and the manual fixing may be more trouble than it’s worth

– Crashes quite often– May end up sharing

more information than you are comfortable with

• Advantages– open source, free– best paper detection

online (even amazon books)

– Great integration with word AND LyX, openoffice

– Metadata stays in the cloud

– offers ‘facebook-like’ features, more to come

• disadvantages– lives inside Firefox. UI is

not as good as standalone apps

– search is slow. – The more references

you have, the slower it feels

– Less templates than endNote

Conclusions

• Mendeley is the most ambitious and fast-moving. There are still glitches for day-to-day use

• Zotero is the most effective for my workflow

• EndNote is dead