21 February 2010
By Sarah Davies
Hannah recently posted on the web tool citeulike and how it can help organise your references online. This got me thinking about citation managers more generally, which these days seem a pretty much essential part of life as an academic. Pretty much everyone I know uses one, and some of my colleagues even use particular shared ‘libraries’ to help them write collaborative papers.
You can probably tell by my language use (is ‘citation manager’ even the right term?) that I’m not that up to date with these programmes. Six years ago I was given some basic training in both Reference Manager (which I still use) and EndNote, and my knowledge pretty much stops there. I use Reference Manager to download and store citations (though pretty much all in one big library), but I’ve never quite got the hang of the ‘cite as you write’ tool which lets you create a reference list as you write your paper.
Terrifyingly, the ever-helpful Wikipedia lists – at my count – 27 different programmes in a page called ‘Comparison of reference management software’. 27! I’m sure many of these do wonderful and complex things, but I can’t even begin to understand the different features Wikipedia compares.
So this is a call-out to the research staff community: what’s your favourite software? What essential features couldn’t you live without? And – on the other hand – is there anyone else out there who usually ends up cutting and pasting references from their previously published work…?
Hannah Dee22 February 2010 at 10:01 AM
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I use LaTeX for all my writing, so I use the companion software Bibtex to insert references. It's fairly low-level (it's not WYSIWYG - you directly enter the codes) but I'm a computer scientist so that's fine by me; I'm perfectly at home in a text editor. For management and storage of references as you've probably guessed from my previous posts on the matter, I'm a complete citeulike convert.
Blanka Sengerová22 February 2010 at 01:55 PM
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I've used EndNote for writing my thesis and have found it pretty useful, especially in terms of the 'cite while you write' feature which saved an awful lot of manual referencing. My only gripe with it is that you cannot easily combine a reference list over a number of documents. So whilst I wrote all my chapters as separate documents, there came a time when I had to combine them together because of the references (although this was also needed for page numbering and tables of contents etc.). I also use the EndNote software to keep track of my references as I go along in my current project.
Sarah Davies22 February 2010 at 03:58 PM
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Thanks, Hannah, but could you translate? Is Latex a word processor (as opposed to something more kinky)? And what is WYSIWYG? Interestingly this message was in my inbox this morning: Research Methods Workshop: Zotero (a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources) I guess that's another one to add to the list...
Hannah Dee22 February 2010 at 04:43 PM
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The easy one first - What You See Is What You Get. It's a term used to describe systems in which the editing mimics the print layout (like Word). LaTeX is simultaneously more than a wordprocessor and less than a wordprocessor. You can get fancy editors for it - like Lyx - but you can also just type the code directly. It's used a lot in science as the equation handling is so much better than, well, anything else. You can find out more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX It's got a fairly steep initial learning curve, but after about half a day you've got it down. I'd say it's really not hard at all and has none of the bugs of (say) Word when handling long documents and equations, and I'd say that learning LaTeX probably saved me about a week of headaches whilst writing up my PhD.
Chris Thomson22 February 2010 at 04:54 PM
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LaTeX is pronounced either Lay-Tek or Lay-Tex. So it does sound quite kinky when you think about it. Anyhow I'd echo that it is easy to use even if you don't need to add lots of equations, the biggest issue you are likely to have is install it under Windows as it seems to prefer Unix machines, unless it has been improved in the last few years. The biggest drawback is having to collaborate with colleagues who don't know how to use it, and the lack of a simple graphical "track changes" system like in Word, which is one of the few features I really like.
Matthew Salois22 February 2010 at 06:45 PM
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Hi Sarah. You are not alone, I too copy and paste my references from paper to paper (assuming they share the same citations). Is this a social science thing, maybe? I just have not yet found the incentive to switch to a reference editor, and I must admit, I remain skeptical as to how much doing so will really improve my efficiency. I am also new to the LaTeX world and have been using LyX for over a year now. I found it pretty simple to pick up the basics (just like the half a day that Hannah suggested), though I am still learning all the ins and outs.
Sarah Davies17 March 2010 at 05:38 PM
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A quick update on this: I've recently switched to a Mac from a PC and have discovered Sente - see http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/introduction.html - which is designed specifically for Mac OS X. I'm also checking out Zotero, which turns out to be Firefox-based and, even better, completely free. See http://www.zotero.org/.