Reference management software, citation management software or personal
bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use
for recording and utilising bibliographic citations. Once a citation
has been recorded, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies,
such as lists of references in scholarly books, articles and essays. The
development of reference management packages has been driven by the rapid
expansion of scientific literature. These software packages normally consist
of a database in which full bibliographic references can be entered,
plus a system for generating selective lists of articles in the different
formats required by publishers and scholarly journals. Modern reference
management packages can usually be integrated with word processors so that
a reference list in the appropriate format is produced automatically as an
article is written, reducing the risk that a cited source is not included in
the reference list. They will also have a facility for importing the details of
publications from bibliographic databases.
Reference management software does not do the same job as a bibliographic
database, which tries to list all articles published in a particular
discipline or group of disciplines; examples are those provided by Ovid
Technologies, Thomson Reuters or monodisciplinary learned societies e.g.
the American Psychological Association. These databases are large and have to be
housed on major server installations. Reference management software collects a
much smaller database, of the publications that have been used or are
likely to be used by a particular author or group, and such a database can easily
be housed on an individual's personal computer.
Apart from managing references, most reference management software also
enables users to search references from online libraries. These online libraries
are usually based on Z39.50 public protocol. Users just need to specify the
IP address, database name and keywords to start a Z39.50 search. It is quicker
and more efficient than a web browser. However, Z39.50 is a little out of date.
Some popular scientific websites, such as Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore and
arXiv, do not support the Z39.50 protocol.
Citation creators Citation creators or citation generators
are online tools which facilitate the creation of works cited and
bibliographies. Citation creators use web forms to take input and format the
output according to guidelines and standards, such as the Modern Language
Association's MLA Style Manual, American Psychological Association's APA style,
The Chicago Manual of Style, or Turabian format. Some citation creators generate
only run-time output, while others store the citation data for later use.
Reference management software among legal scholars
A comparison of usage of Refworks, Endnote, and Zotero among the legal
scholars at the Oxford University Law Faculty was performed by survey. 0% of
survey participants used Refworks; 40% used Endnote; 17% used Zotero, mostly
research students. The difficulty of using Refworks, Endnote, and Zotero by
Oxford legal scholars was estimated by the author as well. A comparison of
these tools for legal scholars was made across several usage scenarios,
including: installing and setting up OSCOLA citation style; building a
personal legal bibliographic library and using extracting metadata from legal
biobliographic databases; generating footnotes and bibliographies for
academic publications; using and modifying OSCOLA citation style.
Reference management in Wikipedia Wikipedia, which runs on the MediaWiki
software, has built-in tools for the management of references. These tools,
in many ways, have the function of reference management software, in that
they automatically number the references, generate the reference list
and create links between the component of the citation in the text and the
reference list. Unlike traditional reference management tools, MediaWiki
does not store references in a database constructed to facilitate ease of
citation. See also
Comparison of reference management software
COinS – method to embed bibliographic metadata in the HTML code of web pages
Z39.50 – international standard client–server, application layer
communications protocol for searching and retrieving information from a
database over a TCP/IP computer network; widely used in library environments
Reference software References
External links OpenOffice.org Bibliographic Project
Ironic look at the question what the best reference manager is
What makes a bad reference manager? Discussion of how to determine whether a
reference manager is evil and when it should not be used
Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging