Tuesday 3 December 2013

Bibliographic Reference Manager Wars

It seems to me that competition is heating up between the different reference managers that are available. I am seeing more people using Zotero and Mendeley, although Endnote is still the weapon of choice for most people. However, the other two products are free, at least if you do not need the extra storage space available for a price.

To consider Mendeley first, I confess that I have never got on with it very well. The interface into Word has been cleaned up significantly and it does work, but except for Science Direct I have not been very successful in capturing online papers and other references, for example from JSTOR. Perhaps it is just me.

The other thing which people do object to with Mendeley is that, in April 2013, it was brought by Elsevier, the publishers. Firstly, the question that springs to mind is “why?” According to this article, it is to gain access to the data flows of all the article sharing and groups and so on that the social media side of the product produces. That, of course, is modern business for you, but you might object to your data being used in this way.

The downside of the sharing ability is, of course, the potential breach in copyright. Indeed, the article referred to above notes that Elsevier were one of the protagonists in trying to stop PDF sharing, so that every researcher had to buy their own copy from the publisher. The pros and cons of this are, of course, arguable, but breaching copyright is actually illegal.

Next up is Zotero, which has improved radically over the last few years (i.e. since I last looked). The desktop version works nicely and (once I found the tools) the integration into Word seems fine (the tools are on the Word ‘Add-ins’ menu, but not named as Zotero, at least on my installation. Again, Zotero offers some social networking ability, although I confess I have not explored it as yet.

Finally, we come to the stalwart package of the field, Endnote. This is costly (at least in comparison to the others) and proprietary, although this does not mean that you are committed to using Endnote for evermore, as some people seem to think. All of these packages are interoperable, to a greater or lesser extent, although, annoyingly, some struggle to transfer attached PDFs (I’m still looking into it). Endnote is probably the most powerful, in that if the exact reference style you need is not available, you can modify one, which is not, so far as I can tell, available in either Zotero or Mendeley, at least without a great deal of blood, sweat, and XML.

Of course, with power and flexibility comes complexity, and Endnote is probably the most difficult of the packages to come to terms with. It also has an online version, which is developing rapidly (and rather confusingly) at present, but does not have social networking ability (at least, as yet).

So, there you, you pays your money (or not) and you takes your choice. As I mentioned, Mendeley would not do the things I wanted it to, and so I can’t recommend it. Zotero and Endnote seem to be converging to similar sorts of solutions, so far as I can tell.

Anyway, don’t take my work for it. A useful comparison can be found here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/11/23/harries-referencing-tools/