Thing 5 - Referencing

Zotero or Mendeley

When I wrote my masters dissertation I typed out my bibliography reference by reference. I worked through the whole text too, slotting in the references, remembering where I’d referenced the same thing twice – the whole 15,000 words of it.

from quinnanya on flickr

I don’t say this in a “we had it tough back in my day, you lot, you don’t know you’re born” sort of way. I say it because I didn’t have any alternative (that I was aware of).  It was time consuming and error prone – who would chose that?
There are so many tools out there these days that there’s no reason for anyone -  student, academic, researcher, would-be librarian  – anyone to have to do that anymore.  
For those of us still in the throes of writing essays, or perhaps writing articles for professional journals, picking one piece of software and running with it makes life a lot easier. But looking beyond our own needs to consider the needs of the library users we support, being aware of a number of different tools is always an advantage (and a big selling point on a CV). Being able to explore the pros and cons of different ways of achieving the same goal helps others decide which is the tool for them.

Managing information in this way, and helping others to do so too demonstrates our worth in a new way, and is a very useful skill. We’re not just there to help people find information, we can help them manage it to more easily achieve their goal. (I’m mostly thinking of these tools in an academic or research environment, but please give me examples their use in public libraries, business  information centres – anywhere!)

There are 4 essential elements that you need in any reference management system. The ability to:

• import references from a number of different sources (eg websites, library catalogues, bibliographic databases etc)
• manage and/or edit the references once they’re in the system, and add manually any references that you cannot find online
• export references into the document that you’re writing, either as a single bibliography, or individually, often called “cite while you write” which generates a list of references.
• format the bibliography according the referencing style of your choice, and re-format if/when necessary

There are some other “bells and whistles” which might be nice. The ability to:

• share references with colleagues, supervisors, co-authors
• attach the text of the article to the reference (as a PDF attachment mostly), so you can manage the full-text documents as well as the references
• find full text of the articles in your list of references (particularly relevant in academic libraries)
• manage your full-text articles- perhaps by ensuring that file names are consistent,
• detect and delete duplicates - if an article is important, you may find it more than once - but you don’t want more than one entry in your list of references.

There are many commercial products out there – Endnote, Reference Manager, RefWorks and Papers  are just 4 examples. Those of us working in higher education may already have access to one or more of these. But there are also some tools which are available open source - free in the first instance, although with option to pay for more storage/services. These are accessible to anyone (so long as you’ve got the rights to download software onto your computer!)
There’s a comparison table in Wikipedia and Martin Fenner produced a useful comparison between 8 different tool.

Of the many possibles, we’re going to look at 2 free ones:

Zotero and Mendeley

NB - these tools will require you to download plugins etc to your desk top.

Thing A -  Zotero – www.zotero.org

Zotero is an open source product that started life as a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox but in its 3.0 version is now available as a standalone desktop tool which is compatible with Chrome and Safari, as well as a plugin for your Firefox browser.
A useful video which demonstrates Zotero is available and rather than re-invent the wheel, I suggest you watch this.
Zotero is free, but you can get extra storage space and more flexibility for a monthly subscription if you need it.
I think it’s a great - a simple to use product which allows easy importing of references from a lot of sources – just by a click of an icon that will appear in your URL bar. Check if the ones you use regularly are covered: http://www.zotero.org/translators
Zotero also encourages collaboration by providing a social networking element to their site - you can create groups ( private or public) where you can share your reference lists - a bit like delicious.
The standalone desktop tool will also let you organise the PDFs that you might have gathered up already - so you can start managing your references now even if you’ve had no system previously.
Zotero has a plugin for MS Word too - so you can “cite while you write”.
To ensure a back-up of your references (to save tears if your computer crashes!) you can synchronise your Zotero system to the Zotero website - I would recommend doing this on a regular basis to ensure least disaster if anything should go wrong.

Thing B – Mendeley – www.mendeley.com

Mendeley also requires a download, but this time it’s a desktop feature only, rather the forcing you to use one particular browser.  Like Zotero, there is a free version of Mendeley, but more features and increased storage are available if you chose to subscribe.
There’s some great introductory videos available, plus loads of supporting documentation.

One of the nicest features, is that if you’re starting off with a desktop or folder full of PDFs, there is a “watched folder” feature that you can point Mendeley towards, and it extracts metadata from the PDF files and populates your Mendeley library automatically. This is great if you/your library user has a great morass of files they want to organise retrospectively - and I’ve never seen a room of researchers go quiet so quickly as when you show them this feature, plus the one that renames the files in a tidy and consistent way (really very impressive!)

There’s also a PDF editor function within Mendeley, so you can “scribble” on the full-text articles (though you can get this functionality without by using PDF-XChange)
Mendeley has the added bonus that when you synch your desktop with the web version of Mendeley - a good thing to do since it acts as a back-up for all your references - the PDF (if you’ve attached it) will go into the cloud too, so you can access your full-text articles wherever you are.
The group/social networking function in Mendeley takes things a step further, by allowing you to set up a closed group where collabators can share the full-text articles, not just the references.

There is, of course, a “cite while you write” plug in to install for Word, and you can pick one of many many different referencing styles to make your bibliography beautiful.

Mendeley also has a very nice iPad or iPhone app which means you can always keep up with your reading and keep adding to your reference list.

Your Thing

For this week’s Thing, I’d like you to explore, and watch the videos for these two reference managers. If you have the rights to download software to your computer, then have a play with at least one of them.
Reflect on how these tools might help the people who use your library - why might they find them useful? Perhaps you’re working towards chartership, or are writing essays for a course you’re on - how could a reference management tool help you achieve some of your own goals?

If you’re already using one or several of these tools - perhaps for your own work, or perhaps purely in order to teach others how to use them, please share it. How are you using them? Do you have a preference? If you are running courses, who are they for? What format do these courses take? Does this service help to change perceptions of the library service?