Some (including Paperpile, RefWorks and Sciwheel) are exclusively web-based, meaning there is no installation or cloud syncing required, and most provide mobile apps that allow users to read and add references from their smartphones or tablets. Reference managers are typically desktop applications with an associated web interface that allows researchers to remotely access their own user ‘libraries’ - curated lists of references and associated PDFs - as well as browser plug-ins that make it easy to import references from a journal web page or other online source. The variables considered include cost, cloud-storage limits, operating-system compatibility and support for annotating PDFs (for a list of various reference managers and their features, see Supplementary table). “Having a reference manager versus not having a reference manager is just a sea change,” he says.įrancavilla catalogued some basic criteria for choosing a reference manager in a 2018 review ( M. Michael Francavilla, a paediatric radiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, uses his reference manager as an electronic brain - a place where he can store what he’s learnt about the conditions he treats, as well as informative graphics that he can share with patients and trainees. Weeks later, on the advice of a university librarian, she was using Zotero to insert citations in an online magazine when she was moved to tweet: “HOW AM I JUST USING A CITATION MANAGER FOR THE FIRST TIME?” Reference features So she turned to an online bibliography generator, and “used as few citations as possible to save myself some pain”, she says. But for her exam, she needed a format that Google Scholar didn’t support, and she had no time to learn to use a new piece of software that did. She had been using Google Scholar, which can output references in only a small number of styles. When Wissel took the preliminary examinations required by her department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, to advance in her doctoral programme, she struggled with the citations. For PhD student Emily Wissel, who studies how the microbiome affects pregnancy, it was Zotero’s status as a freely available, open-source project that led her to favour it over other software. (ReadCube Papers is supported by Digital Science - part of Holtzbrinck, the majority shareholder in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature.)įor Goldacre, Paperpile’s seamless compatibility with Google Docs, which the team uses for collaborative writing, is what tipped the scales towards its use. There are dozens of options, including EndNote, Mendeley Reference Manager, ReadCube Papers, RefWorks, Sciwheel and Zotero. Reference-management tools, also called citation managers, perform a handful of related functions: searching the literature storing and organizing PDFs of papers and supplementary materials generating bibliographies and fostering collaboration. That’s because it dovetails nicely with his team’s workflow. Goldacre, who is also director of the DataLab at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, UK, explains: “Paperpile is the first time I’ve used a reference manager where it didn’t make me want to punch myself in the face on a regular basis out of sheer rage. Physician Ben Goldacre, for instance, has tweeted at least five times about Paperpile, a subscription-based reference manager that integrates tightly with Google Docs, calling it “amazing”, “fantastic, best ever”, and “unbeLIEVably good”. For such utilitarian tools, reference management software can inspire strong reactions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |