Reference Management Tools

Jack G. ZhengAssistant Professor, IT Department

Nov 7, 2012

Professional Development Workshop

Agenda

• Reference management overview

• Tools survey and comparison

• Try Zotero

Reference Management

• Reference management software, citation management software or personal bibliographic management software – for scholars and authors to use for managing

and creating bibliographic citations (references).

• Why use a software program?– Organizing hundreds and thousands of papers– Dealing with different format requirements from

different journals and conferences– Automatic sorting

Desired Features

• Must have features– Citation organization (search, sort, filtering, categorization, tag,

etc.)– Editor integration– Easy and flexible formatting/styling– Auto identification and import– Citation export/backup

• Nice to have features– Centralized storage or synchronized– Offline paper copies– Annotation– Collaboration– Literature search

Tools

• Commercial– EndNote: http://endnote.com/– Mendley: http://www.mendeley.com/– Papers: http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/

• Open source– Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/

• Comparison– http://www.istl.org/11-summer/refereed2.html– http://www.library.wisc.edu/citation-managers/comparison.h

tml– http://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/– http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/reference-manager-overview/

A Short Tutorial on Zotero

• Download and install• Search and save from browsers• Organize papers• Insert citation and reference• Style and format• Custom style• Use a web storage service

Zotero Installation

• Download from http://www.zotero.org/– Current version 3.0

• Downloading and installation Options– Using Firefox?

• Firefox plugin for Firefox (Firefox connector included)• Word processor plugins (Word, LibreOffice)

– Not using Firefox?• Zotero Standalone (editor plugin included)• Zotero Standalone Connectors (for Chrome and Safari)

– Install all of them• Firefox plugin (Firefox connector included)• Zotero Standalone (editor plugins included)

Basic UI in Firefox

Start Zotero

Auto detection and import icon

Library, collections and tags

References with offline paper copies

Reference details, editable

Tools

Add Articles

• Manual insertion

• Save from the web– Reference– PDF files– Web page snapshots– Links

New item button

Reference detection and auto import

Organize References

Instant searching

Searching and filtering

by tags

Add and delete tags for each

item

Use collection and

subcollection for hierarchical categorization You can drag and

drop items to collections. Items can be in multiple

collections.

Insert into Word

Open the Zotero addin tool bar

Insert a new citations

Start typing - auto completion is on.

Insert Bibiliography

Insert a bibliography at the end of the

paperA citation is inserted in the body of the paper.

Choose a Style

• Use the Style Manager to manage styles– Tools Options

• Download style files and add them here.– http://www.zotero

.org/styles/

Storage

• The database and download files are stored in a local directory

• Working on multiple computers?– Use the Sync function provided by Zotero server.– Use a cloud storage service from DropBox, Google, or

SkyDrive

Use Google Drive (5GB free) for web storage

Resource

• Quick start guide– http://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide– http://www.zotero.org/support/screencast_tutorials

• Editing citations styles– http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles

• Citation Style Language– http://citationstyles.org/styles/

• Citeproc-js CSL processor– https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/wiki/Home