1. Selecting a Reference
Management package: -
what's available?
Date
Rosemary Rodd
service-desk@ucs.cam.ac.uk

2. Health and Safety

3. General Information

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
Course files can be downloaded from:
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
Let us know if you need assistance: Please ask
questions

4. General Information
 Objectives: select the best reference management program FOR YOU
 Pre-requisites: prior use of a wordprocessing program and web browser
 Duration & Break: 1 hour
 Course Material: handout
 Delivery Style: lecture and handout

5. Follow-on courses:
EndNote
EndNote Web
Mendeley
Zotero
Web Skills for Researchers: Web of Knowledge and Scopus

6. What are Reference Mangement Programs?

7. Special examples of databases: you could use Excel or Access if you
wanted to.
References may be used to document any kind of information source. For
example:
Print material: books, journal articles...
Audiovisual: TV, radio, film, podcast...
Music: CD, MPG...
Images: paintings, drawings, photos...
Web pages

8. If your discipline requires complicated rules for reference layout it
may be tricky (occasionally impossible) to find an output style
which will satisfy the requirements.
ALWAYS produce a small sample and show it to your supervisor,
publisher etc. for approval before doing a large amount of work.
Your supervisor is also the right person to ask for advice about
discipline-related protocols such as anonymisation of any personal
data you have collected.
Don't leave all this until the week before you are due to submit your
work!

9. Too Much Choice!!
Possibilities include:
o MS Word’s in-built bibliography feature - free as part of Word
o EndNote Desktop - £89
o EndNote Web - Free for Cambridge University members
o Reference Manager (Windows only) - £180
o Procite (Windows only) - £180
o Zotero - free to download open source (premium features charged for)
o Mendeley - free to download open source (premium features charged)
o Papers - £30 No citation feature.
o BibTeX - free, but complicated to learn/integrate with document
o Qiqqa – free “lite” version, charged premium version.

10. Multi-Stage Process
o Collecting references
o Reading the material (I hope!)
o Organising your thoughts and drawing conclusions
from your reading
o Citing into a document which represents your own
original work.
Programs are not equally good at handling each stage

11. Follow the herd
If everyone else in your department uses a particular
program, you may be well advised to do the same.
o Peer assistance.
o Ease of exchanging files.
o Output is likely to conform to local standards.

12. Where are your references??
Somewhere in cyberspace?
Somewhere on your computer, but you don’t know where?
In your documents folder?

13. Does it matter?
Yes!
o If you can’t be sure whether important data is backed
up or not.
o If you CAN’T back up your data because you can’t find
it.
o If you can’t access your data because someone else’s
servers are down.
o If you over-write your data because you are confused
about which is the most recent version.
o If your partner over-writes your data because they are
confused!
o If someone gets a court order to read your data.

14. MS Word
• Little ability to harvest references from online
sources: must be typed in.
• Reference layout can be changed without re-
typing by using layout styles
• No facility to modify layouts.
• References are stored inside your normal
word documents and backed up with them.

15. EndNote Desktop
• Excellent ability to harvest online references.
Can be complicated to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without
retyping using output styles
• Output styles can be edited (GUI interface).
• References should be stored in the documents
folder, but the unwary user can select an
obscure (and dangerous!) location or get
muddled and only save part of the file.

16. EndNote Desktop
• Excellent ability to harvest online references.
Can be complicated to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without
retyping using output styles
• Output styles can be edited (GUI interface).
• References should be stored in the documents
folder, but the unwary user can select an
obscure (and dangerous!) location or get
muddled and only save part of the file.

17. EndNote Web
Excellent ability to harvest from online sources.
Simple to set up.
Reference layout can be changed without
retyping using output styles
No facility for user to modify output styles
References stored on Thomson Reuters’
servers in the US

18. Reference Manager
• Excellent ability to harvest online references. Can be
complicated to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping
using output styles.
• Output styles can be modified by user.
• References should be in the documents folder but,
as with EndNote desktop, it’s possible for a naïve
user to set up a different location by mistake.

19. Zotero
• Excellent ability to harvest references online. Simple
to set up.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping
using output styles.
• Only “power users” can modify output styles.
• References are stored inside the local Firefox
preferences folder and also synched with Zotero
servers, but this can be customised.
An unwary user might assume references are NOT
stored on the local machine.

20. Legal References

Unique difficulties because layout is very important but follows rules
which are hard to express in mechanical terms.

Most legal databases store references in free-format (untagged) form
so can't be automatically downloaded and imported.

There is a project to develop a version of Zotero which can handle
legal citations: see http://citationstylist.org/ This is still at an
experimental stage.

21. Mendeley
• No online search option: mainly intended as a
repository of PDF files discovered by other means.
• Perhaps the best option if you already have lots of
stored article PDFs
• “Social” options give suggestions of papers which
may be relevant to your work.
• Reference layout can be changed without retyping
using output styles.
• Only “power users” can modify output styles.
• References are stored inside the user’s Library
directory, but synched to Mendeley’s servers

22. Qiqqa
• Online search options.
• OCR option for PDFs in the older image format
• Unique “topic analysis” suggests themes in papers
• “Brainstorm” to explore relationships between papers
• Reference layouts can be changed without retyping
using output styles, but not many available yet.
• Only power users can modify styles: no GUI interface
• References are stored inside the user’s Library
directory, but can be synched to Qiqqa’s servers
• Windows only

23. BibTeX

Not relevant to search of online sources.

Reference layout can be changed using
output styles.

Users can modify output styles

References are stored as a plain text file in
the documents folder

Really only useful if you plan to use LaTeX,
although some of the GUI packages use
BibTeX format to store reference data

24. GIGO!

25. Quality Control Quality Control
http://www.vtstutorials.co.uk
Free Internet tutorials on a range of subject areas produced
by a consortium of UK universities to give students the skills
needed to evaluate information sources

26. Quality Controlproduct
No one is right for everyone

A user with minimal computer skills, but good, fast & accurate typing
may be safest with MS Word. The best choice if few useful references
are available to harvest online and you need to enter a lot of your own
annotation (e.g. critical edition of 18th century letters).

Someone in a department where everyone uses BibTeX may get on well
by fitting in with the rest.

If you enjoy experimenting with gadgets, you may be happy using a mix
of Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and Qiqqa.

In a discipline which requires complex reference layouts, EndNote
desktop may be the only viable option.

If you are concerned about the dominance of Thomson Reuters in
publication analysis you may want to avoid products from their stable.

If you are a spy you do not want the CIA to look at your reading list!

27. Features of some of the packages

28. Social Aspects
“People like you read...”
Once you have a significant library of PDFs that
you regularly sync online Mendeley will begin to
suggest other papers that may be relevant to your
work.

29. Mendeley learns topics that are relevant to you

30. Qiqqa: document window

31. Qiqqa: brainstorms explore connections

34. Will automatically convert web pages to PDF
Scholar contains
internal data about
US legal cases in
HTML format.
Zotero will save the
citation information
but currently only
Qiqqa will save the
page as a PDF and
add to your local
database

35. Zotero has particular strengths for legal citations
Search and download
legal cases via
Google Scholar: but
sadly only for the US
courts at present.