RESEARCH GROUP ON THE
MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA
AHKR, University of Bergen
REFERENCE PROGRAMS
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HOW DO I DO IT?
<<In the survey on the previous page we made a comparison between the most relevant academic reference programs for Macs and PC, looking at which of them was more useful in the various stages of researching and writing a paper. But if we are to commit to a system, it would be useful to know a bit more about how each of them work. Thus, we shall on this supplementary page delve a bit further into details that I have been able to ferret out after some trial rounds with these programs.
Searching for references
The two programs that use a list form to
search online catalogues, Papers
and EndNote, aim at quite different types of sources, and Papers almost
looks like it wants to be a supplement to EndNote rather than an
alternative. Thus, for our purposes it is only Google Scholar and JStor
that is of interest in Papers. It can also search in Project Muse, but
the current version has a bug that blocks the display of individual
hits there. The rest of its available sources is of little or no
interest to us (bar perhaps Scopus, which my university does not
subscribe to). Still, access to Google Scholar as well as JStor is so important that Papers becomes a very useful research tool.
The problem is only that you get too many
hits in Google Scholar if you ask for a general topic. Papers will
inform you of how many (thousand) hits Google has found, and presents
the first 30-40 to you in a list. Then you can import more, thirty at a
time, and since Google does prioritize its hits, you will generally get
the most useful first. (The hits you get in Papers are not the same as
those you get on the Google web page; Papers only picks up article
references, not books, and it also uses a different sort order that
seems to prioritize better than Google's web). It will however be
useful to refine your search by adding terms that a relevant article
should contain, so the result becomes a bit more manageable. JStor has
the same limitation, but does not give quite as many
thousand hits as Google.
Notice, however (this goes for all
programs) that you cannot trust the data from Google Scholar blindly. In particular, it sometimes gives the wrong year
for journals, and other data you need may be missing. This is probably
due to how the data was acquired by Google - it is after all
very eclectic - but do check if the data you get from them looks reasonable and complete.
Sente
and BookEnds
have both ways of searching, "list" and "web". It is only in
Sente that this division feels complete. In its web search, you get a
regular browser window, and you can of course visit any website in it.
But it is only when Sente has the routines required to recognize the
metadata (author's name, title, etc.) that you will see the red dot
icon that allows you to pull the data into your reference "library".
You can then also import all references on a web page in one operation.
Sente comes with a number of suggestions for supported web sites, but
you can also check out others to see if the red dot appears. Sometimes
they will.
• What I call "list mode" here, which is most common for library catalogues (and thus for book titles,
not articles), is technically called "Z39.50". This is a format that
many libraries provide and EndNote, Sente and BookEnds use to import the relevant data. You might
believe this means that if one program supports a Z39 catalogue, they
all do. That is clearly not the case. There are a number of barriers,
not least passwords but also local "dialects", that the
program has to adapt for each library. Thus, EndNote does not seem to grant us
access to the WorldCat library (which is run by the American
inter-library organization OCLC), because it asks for a password that
is not generally available. Your university may or may not have a local
connection setup that solves this. The same is the case for many of
EndNote's 4,000 library connections, they turn out to be
unavailable unless you have a special local setup. EndNote, Sente and
BookEnds give you the opportunity to create your own Z39 connections if
you get the necessary information from the library in question, but you
can in no way assume that these will work.
BookEnds also lets you
search e.g. Amazon and Google Scholar in list mode. You can also search
in a separate web browser window, but it is only from Google Scholar,
WorldCat and Library of Congress that you can acquire metadata from web
pages (the window shows a small green icon if it can import data).
Thus, the web browser is here clearly of less value than in Sente, but
in Z39 list mode, the two are fairly equivalent.
Notice that BookEnds also has a free
version, Reference Miner,
which contains a small selection of the BookEnds search sites (Amazon,
Google Scholar and LC). It also has a web browser window. But it can only
search and display the found hits, you cannot store them or do anything
else with them. It is thus difficult to see what this program does that
Safari does not do equally well, except maybe getting a MARC record from LC.
• Papers and
Sente retain the results of any search you have made even after
you have quit the program and restarted (until you delete them). The others do not, but BookEnds can store the
search queries so that you can make an updated search (Sente also allows
you to automatically update a previous search).
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Papers allows you to update searches in different ways, it makes
e.g. a list of the authors and journals in your bibliography and
automatically looks up new articles for each (mainly
from JStor, which of course generally has a three/five-year delay. Also
Papers does not always distinguish between authors with similar
names).
- In Sente, you can quickly create a reference for a book from its ISBN
number, the relevant data is collected from an online source and added
to your bibliography.
- Sente and Zotero can create a reference from an open web page,
storing its content as a web archive (for Zotero of course only in
Firefox, in Sente as well dragging the url worked for me only from Firefox and TextEdit).
Zotero
and Mendeley lack any search
functions of their own, as they are based on searches you make in your
regular web browser (Firefox in Zotero). In Mendely, this means that
you "bookmark" the page that lists the hits, this will let you
choose which items to import if Mendely understands the web page. In
Zotero, the toolbar shows an icon for single item pages or for lists
(which lets you pick out items on the page). Sometimes, Zotero does not
understand a page with multiple hits, but will let you import the data
from a individual entry's web page. In Zotero, you can also set your
local campus library as your "home", then a click on a title in your
bibliography will take you to that item in your library's catalogue (if
it has the book!) so you can check it out or order a loan, even when
the reference originally was gathered from a different source.
It is a matter of taste whether you prefer
list mode or web searches. In list mode, like in Papers, your searches have the same format whichever source you go to and you can quickly switch between them. In web mode, the search form depends on each web page, but you can
access special functions that only that library's web page has.
• Some library catalogues also have an
option called "Export", "Export to Citation Manager" or "Export to EndNote" on their web
pages. Then any references you have selected on the web page will be
stored as a text file on your computer, and all programs here - not
just EndNote - can import data from these files (which are in the "RIS"
format). WorldCat and JStor have such a function; of the
sources of particular interest to us, also Historical
Abstracts, ProQuest and Web
of Knowledge, as well as several journal publishers' home pages.
- Notice in particular ebrary,
which none of the programs can import data from directly. You can
however import a reference, with its link to the full text, via the
button "[export to] Endnote".
You may have to look around a bit for this
function, in WorldCat you can store individual references each to a
file. For multiple hits, it is more useful to log in (for free),
establish a "list" in WordCat with the references you want to extract,
and then export them from the list's "citation view". Check here
for a survey of how you do this export
thing in different catalogues. If the library gives you a choice
between export formats, always choose EndNote, no matter which program
you actually use, as this is the format all programs understand. In the program, choose Import from
EndNote or from "RefMan / RIS". In some programs (Papers) you may have
to change the downloaded file's extension to .txt or .ris for the
program to understand it.
Reading articles in full text
Some online databases contain the full text of the articles
in web format rather than as PDFs, thus JStor, Hein, and others. All
programs (except EndNote, which is not relevant for this section) will
display such a web page when you have located it in JStor (in BookEnds,
JStor does not return replies directly, but you can access JStor
through Google Scholar). But many sites prefer to provide the full text
as a PDF that you can either read in your browser or download. How do
our programs handle this?Papers will automatically download the PDF and link it to the reference in your bibliography. If you can't be bothered to actually store it, Papers can switch you over to Safari where you can read the PDF without having to save it to your hard disk. BookEnds can also read PDFs online without downloading them, but it is as mentioned only Google Scholar of their browser sites that has full text. Sente isn't quite up to par either, in theory you get the choice between downloading and reading the PDF directly, but there is a bug in the current version that blocks inline reading.
• If you imported the reference to your bibliography without its PDF or full text but this is accessible from the source, then Papers will still link you up directly when you click on the reference. In BookEnds and Sente this depends on whether the reference contains a document identifier or DOI. This is a numeric code that identifies every journal article in a central database. If your reference has such a DOI, then Sente will also find and download the PDF and link it to the item. BookEnds requires a further step, it will send you to Safari where you can either read the PDF directly or download it. If you do download the PDF, BookEnds can then import it in a separate operation, and you can link it manually to the relevant reference (there is a menu "Get PDF from Internet", but it does not work). Without a DOI, neither Sente or BookEnds is able to locate a PDF from an existing reference, you have to carry out a new search and see if you can find the PDF, linking it manually to or replacing the original reference.
EndNote also has a function called "Full Text". But it can only search in Muse and Web of Science of the mildly relevant databases, and Full Text did not respond to anything in either of those, so EndNote is of little or no help in this type of endeavour. It does have a bibliography field for URLs, clicking on one will send you to Safari. Mendeley cannot show the full text of references unless you have already downloaded the PDF. Zotero will take you to where you got the reference from, and Firefox takes over from there; PDF files are read in Acrobat.
• What if you got the reference from another bibliography somewhere without any links to anything, but suspect that the article is actually available in JStor or elsewhere? In Papers you can then choose "Search in Google", and the program will try to find the title in Google Scholar. If the title is found (and mostly it is), then the Google link is stored with the reference and you can access the full text from there if it is available. (If you want, you can easily copy the full text link to the reference, so you do not have to go through Google next time.) In this case, it is just the address to the full text that is stored on your disk, but the effect is almost the same as if the article is on your hard drive, a click on the reference in your list will bring up the text of the article (if, of course, you are still online and have access to your campus e-journals; if you are going offline, download the PDFs you need before you leave).
In Sente and BookEnds, the other two relevant programs, the case is as above: If your older references do not have DOIs, then you must make a fresh new search for each item, download the PDF and link them manually to or replace the original reference item.
However, BookEnds has a very useful function none of others have. This comes in very handy in a situation like this, when we have various existing bibliographies lying around on our computer from various older projects and want to bring them into our new reference program: How do the programs communicate amongst themselves?
Case study: Transforming a title list to an electronic library
A real-life example can illustrate this. I have for twenty years been a sworn
addict to Filemaker as my database program, including for academic
purposes, and have created numerous Filemaker bases for projects I have been
working on. Thus, I have in a current project set up a Filemaker base
with some two thousand titles, books as well as journal articles, which
I have collected from various sources, some from WorldCat, some from
Index Islamicus, some from old databases of my own from previous
related projects: All types for formats and information structures,
which I have hammered into shape manually with fields for author, title, journal etc. I found that about 250 of the articles were from journals that we have online on our campus. I wanted to create an electronic fulltext library of these articles so that clicking on a title in the list brought up the article. But I did not want to search up all those 250 items again, rather I would find a way to automatically attach online texts to the list I already had in Filemaker. But, of course, all of these old titles lacked any of the required links to the full texts.
Unfortunately, none of the programs communicate diretly with Filemaker. The closest you get is to create a sort of "tagged text file" from Filemaker and import this into the reference program, so that author, title, etc. is entered into its proper place. BookEnds is probably the most convenient here, as you can create your own import format in it, but it is likely that you could also do this without too much hassle at least in Papers, Sente and Zotero. Anyway, I had already done this part, since I had started working with EndNote before and moved my Filemaker base into EndNote. This did require some tearing of the hair, but I had made it work. But since EndNote does not give access to full text, as mentioned, this was not the answer. Happily, EndNote is the kind of common denominator for these programs, all of them can read records exported from EndNote (mostly as xml files), and most can export data in the same format, so we can with some ease send bibliographies between these programs.
This is where the useful function of BookEnds comes in. I imported the 250 article references into BookEnds, and chose Get DOI from a menu. The program then took title by title and searched in the central DOI register for a match (without any intervention from me). I was quite surprised by the result, given the heteroclitic origin of my references: A DOI match was found for two thirds of my titles in a matter of seconds. As I had found Papers to be the most promising program to actually read text, I exported the references again from BookEnds as EndNote xml, now with DOIs added, and imported them into Papers. The text of the 165 items that had got a DOI were then immediately available with a click on the title. For the rest, I could do a Search Google and create the link for them in Papers. Success.
Besides xml (the EndNote type, unfortunately there are many xml dialects), the most generelly used file format is "RefMan" or RIS. Zotero can import only this, all the others also handle it. EndNote is again the most flexible program, it can import records in about 100 different file types, while Sente can use about ten and Papers a bit fewer file formats.
Import of existing PDFs
Above, then, we had a title in our bibliography and wanted to download
a PDF for this title. But what about the opposite type of import, when
you have some or a lot of PDFs on you hard disk, without any specific
system or data to them, and want to get these into the bibliography you
are creating? If you already have the corresponding item in your
bibliography, then it is generally easy to link a local PDF to it by
drag-and-drop onto the item or choose it in a menu, as we mentioned
above for freshly imported PDFs. But what about when you have just the
PDF, and the title does not exist in your program's bibliography? Even if you
can see the author and title in the PDF, you would rather not have to
type all this into your reference program by hand, certainly if you
have dozens and dozens of such PDFs. Can the program take care of this,
introduce PDFs into its system, with fully finished structured
bibliographic data?We mentioned that it "depends on the PDF" how easy this is. Again, it is the DOI that is the key: A PDF may have this ID number hidden in the file, and if you have a reference with a matching DOI then all programs will link them directly. If it cannot find a matching DOI in your library, it will download the relevant information from Google Scholar and create a new item in your library with the PDF attached to it.
But if the PDF does not have such a hidden DOI identifier - and my experience is that only about one in ten do - then all programs will try to locate the correct reference in Google Scholar, with your help: Most often, you can select a bit of text inside the PDF, a few words of the title or the author's name, and drag this to the Search field of the program (Sente: "Search with selection"). Normally you will get a number of possible hits in Google (they all use Google Scholar, a few also PubMed, which you can turn off for our purposes); you click on the one that matches your PDF and the metadata is imported and linked to the PDF. In this list of potentials, Sente will only present you with the journal title, not the article title, so you have to remember this to match correctly, and in Papers the correct title is most often a bit down the list of possibles, but it works. If Google does not give any correct hit, Sente forces you to write the data in manually, the others let you import the PDF "anonymously" so you can import the reference from another source and link them manually.
– BookEnds can also search the other way, you can select a reference in your bibliography and BookEnds will scour your hard disk to see if it finds a matching PDF, using Spotlight. This actually works quite well.
I made some haphazard tests with old PDFs I had lying around to see how many the programs could match up in this way. The result was in fact quite good. Papers, BookEnds and Sente took ten out of ten (in Sente I had to edit the text I dragged from the PDF a bit), Zotero got six out of then, but there making a new search for the reference and linking them was quite fast. Mendeley did not fare quite as well, only two out of ten gave the correct result, the others had either missing or incorrect data.
- Mendeley lets you set up a "watch folder" on your hard drive (e.g. the Download folder of your web browser), and new PDFs put there will be automatically imported to Mendeley.
- In EndNote you can also link a downloaded PDF manually to a reference. It can be read in Acrobat, EndNote has no further help in handling PDFs.
Organizing your references
When
your collection of titles passes beyond the dozens stage and starts
climbing beyond a thousand, sorting, searching and organizing them
becomes more important. EndNote, BookEnds and Sente
allows you to have several parallel "library" files, while Papers,
Zotero and Mendeley put all references into one place. But it may
anyway be useful to have all your references in one large file and
rather sort them into various projects according to need (you will e.g.
often use the same titles in different projects. Although these
programs are technically a type of database managers, none of them are
relational or can access other files).
• All programs let you established groups ("collections") of selected references, BookEnds, Sente, Papers and EndNote also dynamic "smart groups" based on specific criteria you set up (similiar to those in Mail and Address Book).
Some also create automatic groups of the authors in your bibliography
(Papers, Sente, BookEnds, Mendeley); journals (Papers, BookEnds) or
keywords (BookEnds).
EndNote does not go much beyond the groups,
except that you can add your own keywords in the field for this, in
addition to those that the source library put there. All the other
programs allow you to write free-form notes and comments on the items,
and all have some more flexible ways of structuring them, although the vary greatly in how much. In Papers you may just "flag" a reference and give it a "star" rating. Mendeley and Zotero let you add one or more "tags" that you define, so that you can find e.g. just those entries tagged "Kenya" and "economy". Sente and BookEnds
are in a different class here. BookEnds has up to 16 user-defined
fields you can adapt to your needs, Sente has an apparently unlimited
number (but does not allow searching in these).
Both have tags, rating, as well as other means of marking your
references (colour coding!). This does not make them anywhere near full
database programs such as Filemaker, but you should be able to use
these functions to structure your reference library.
•
All programs let you search and sort the references, of course.
BookEnds is clearly the most powerful here, you can search in each
field or generally, and you can make advanced searches in sql/regex
(grep) if you know these. The other programs let you search either
generally or in a few specified fields such as author, title, keywords,
tags/notes (in Zotero you can specify any field). Papers, BookEnds, Mendeley and Zotero can also search text inside the attached PDF files, Sente does this through the Mac's Spotlight search.
Integration with word processors
All programs will work with Microsoft Word. As
for other word processors, it varies a bit more. Some are fully
integrated like in Word, in others you have to go through some
intermediary stages. There is also a difference between support for
Microsoft Word 2004 and 2008. Let us look at them in turn. (Here, I
will only discuss Mac versions of the programs, integration may be
different under Windows.)
If you use other word processors than Word or Pages (such as Nisus, Mellel, etc.), you copy the reference from the EndNote library and paste into its place in the paper. This inserts a temporary code in the text. When your paper is finished and you want to format the references, you open it in EndNote, which then scans the file and formats the references and bibliography in the format you have chosen. EndNote can read OpenOffice files in its native format, for others, you have to save the manuscript in RTF format (which is what Nisus uses as standard anyway).
BookEnds creates a separate menu or toolbar in Word 2004, while it in Word 2008 adds a similar menu to the AppleScript menu in Word, which sends to you BookEnds. In NisusWriter it also has a separate menu, while it in Mellel sends the reference to Mellel's "citation" palette, where it enters Mellel's way of handling references. A number of other programs support "Apple Events", in these you may select "Enter citation" in BookEnds, which sends it directly to the word processor. Or you can copy and paste. BookEnds will in all cases insert temporary codes with scan of the finished paper.
Sente works in Word 2004 as EndNote, inserting formatted references through a separate menu. In Word 2008 (only .docx files), Nisus and Pages, Sente uses the same "scan" method as BookEnds, you choose the reference in Sente and send to the word processor by drag-and-drop, copy-paste or a keyboard command, and you can set different behaviours (temporary citation, fixed format, etc.) for each of these. The final paper is then scanned. In Mellel you can search Sente through the Mellel citation palette. You can also enter the code manually, e.g. by using find and replace through your paper, so you do not have to jump back and forth between windows when references are repeated (this seems to work in all programs, including EndNote).
Zotero uses an AppleScript menu and toolbar both in Word 2004 and 2008, and inserts formatted references, which can be reformatted later. It also has a toolbar in OpenOffice. You can also drag-and-drop formatted references to any word processor, and create the bibliography manually from Zotero.
Mendeley claims to integrate with Word 2008 through AppleScript, but this did not work for me. The command appeared in Word 2008, but the quote was sent to Word 2004 which could not accept it! Possibly a minor AppleScript bug, but not "out of the box" at least for me. Mendeley is also said to support GoogleDocs.
All programs also have functions for how to enter the page numbers into a citation; in EndNote you write it into an EndNote dialogue window, in the others you use a code in the temporary reference (such as "@234-239") or similar.
All programs lets you copy individual items in finished format (of your choice) or by drag-and-drop so you can insert it anywhere as regular text, but these will then not be linked to the program, thus you cannot then use the program to change their formatting or generate a bibliography for the paper.
| EndNote | BookEnds | Sente | Zotero | Mendeley | |
| Word 2004 | Menu | Menu * |
Menu | AppleScript | |
| Word 2008 | Menu | AppleScript * |
Copy-paste * |
AppleScript | (AppleScript) |
| NisusWriter | (Copy-paste *) |
Menu * |
Copy-paste * |
|
|
| Mellel | Palette * |
Palette * |
|
||
| Pages | Menu | Copy-paste * |
Copy-paste * |
|
|
| OpenOffice | Copy-paste * |
Copy-paste * | Toolbar |
*
= temporary citations, finished paper is scanned. In other programs via RTF files and copy/paste and scan.
Papers
is more marginal to this discussion, and also says clearly that this is not their main aim. But you can export single or multiple references to Word 2008's "Citations Manager" menu. From there, you can use Word's very limited formatting alternatives (only four different reference formats. You can also drag references from Papers into other windows, but then you only get a rudimentary Harvard format (Smith 2005) which isn't really much point, or an abbreviated
text format which you cannot choose and which does not include the
first name / initial of the author.) This is not very flexible, so the real option is to use Papers together with one of the other programs like EndNote or BookEnds (there is a "Export to BookEnds" menu for this purpose).
Referance formats
What spurred the creation of these programs was the natural scientists' need to format the same manuscript according to many different journal's reference formats, (Smith 2005:234) for some, (Smith 2005, p. 234) or Smith, Black Holes Today, 234 for others. Therefore the programs are all quite flexible in the choice, and change, of reference formatting systems. There is no major difference between the programs in how you choose this, it is always in an easily accessible menu.
But using them means also that the program has control over how the references appear in our paper. Thus the user should check through the available formats and see if she finds something that suits her preference, or that of the journal she wants to submit to. To be prefectly honest, most journals in our field are pretty accommodating and expect to do much of this work themselves, since humanists are normally not so terribly good at taking direction in how to submit manuscripts. Still, some journals are more strict, so we should have the choice, and of course having to save them the trouble of editing footnotes may make them more friendly.
In your own publications, master and ph.d.
theses, you have greater control over how you want to format things. If
you have a specific style you like but cannot find in the provided
options, you can in most programs fiddle with those that get close and
adapt it to your own liking, thus EndNote, BookEnds, Sente, Zotero. The first three use separate dialogue box where you can see different reference types (journal articles, books, conference paper etc.) each with their own rules,
which you can change or create a new style from scratch, either by
changing an example entry or a code. It may be fairly extensive,
EndNote can have more than 50 different types, and there may be a dozen
or more variables to set for each. You should certainly have the manual
in front of you, and also consider all possible cases, what if there is
no editor in an entry? what if there is a city but not publisher? Once
the format is set, it has to conform to all your entries, whether data
is there or not.
BookEnds and Sente are not as expansive as
EndNote (but in Sente I had trouble getting changes to "stick", it may
have been my fault or a bug). Zotero is more demanding, changing a
format there requires programming in xml. They do provide
documentation, and some changes are not all that difficult, but it is
certainly a bit more daunting than the others. The advantage is however
that the result is a separate file that both Sente and Mendeley can
read (a .csl file), so you can import your format to all three
programs. (Sente imports, but does not export its formats. As far as I
can see, there is no way to share a user-created reference format made
in Sente with another Sente user.) EndNote and BookEnds also store
their formats as separate files.
Other bibliography programs
There are also some small and free straightforward bibliography programs, with or without online search options. They can be used to keep track of your references, but do not cover the full process such as the six discussed above aim to, so would not normally replace those.BibDesk is a free Mac program aimed at an advanced text formatting system called "TeX" (LaTeX, BibTeX), but it can also be used as a stand-alone bibliographic database program. It has a few built-in list search options, only Library of Congress is of any interest to us, but also a web search option. Of our key web sources, BibTex can only draw metadata from Google Scholar and WorldCat. You can organize the titles in groups and smart groups. But you must in reality install the TeX engine on your Mac to get the titles out of the database and into the word processor, otherwise you will only get a full, unformatted, form for each title.
JabRef (PC, Mac, Linux) is an even more basic free program which is also focused on TeX. It can search JStor from among our relevant sources (in list mode), and has smart groups etc. References can be exported as xml or html files (that is, as a full form per title, you can also program your own export option) or as an OpenOffice spreadsheet.
Reference Tracker is a very simple Mac program, both how you use it and in what it does: You can look up books by title or ISBN, in both cases, data is pulled from Amazon (which does not give place of publication or editor of edited books, so you must add those manually), or you can type in new references of various types in a quite straightforward form view. (It also imports structured text or BibTex files, and web pages). You can group references, and a group can be exported to a Word or text file as a bibliography in Harvard format (only). That's it, no further frills, functions or alternatives. $45, students $30.
PC programs
Windows does also, of course, have many reference programs. But there does not seem to be many that cover the complete process from source hunting to formatted paper like those above, and those that are close seem to be fully focused on medicine (PubMed searches). However, most available programs are little more than simple database managers that specialize in formatting titles you have entered manually in different journal formats (thus e.g. EazyPaper, $30 and Citations, $99).In addition to those already discussed that also work in Windows, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley, there seem to be three Windows-only programs that are more or less of the same type. Perhaps the most interesting is Swiss, and currently only available in German, Citavi. It searches many sources in list mode, apart from WorldCat and SOAS also JStor and Historical Abstracts among those we singled out (but not Google Scholar). It integrates with Word and OpenOffice. It lacks full text or PDF display, but a reference imported from JStor will display a URL link to the article in JStor. The normal version costs €77, but there is a free version limited to 100 titles.
Quite similar, but at leart partly with English menus, is the German Bibliographix, which also has a limited free version (full version at €49, the free version reminds you of this constantly). It seems to have a bit fewer sources to search from and is mostly aimed at libraries. It does however have web searches to Google Scholar, HighWire and Ingenta journals (but not JStor) and can import references from these with a few clicks on each entry, not quite as smooth as Zotero. PDFs downloaded to your hard disk can be linked to the reference (and read in Acrobat). The program integrates with Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice and rtf. Both of these programs also aim to aid "editing ideas" during your research work.
The third relevant program is Biblioscape. It is a bit heavier ($140, academic $99), but does cover all the various stages of the process, more or less. It can search in list and web mode, has a wide selection of Z39 sources, while web imports are mainly from those sites that support a "Direct Export" or Save to BibTex option. You can download and display PDFs in the program, and organize the references in various ways. It may in many ways be comparable to BookEnds, good support for library catalogues, more rudimentary for journals. It formats bibliographies in Word, WordPerfect and rtf. There is a demo of the full program, while a separate free version, BiblioExpress, lacks both online search and full text support and is primarily a database manager.
(Note that EndNote has recently appeared in a version X4 for Windows only, not tested here. The release notes claim better support for PDFs. The same firm also sells a different program, Reference Manager, which seems to do much the same as EndNote, costs the same, but is generally more cumbersome to use.)
I am not able to make a recommendation just from briefly
looking at these programs. Zotero certainly looks good in comparison,
the Windows-only programs seem to fall short on e-journals and fulltext
both in search and display. It may be that the best bet up from Zotero
is the more expensive Biblioscape, but users may check out the demo- or
free versions of each and see if they make the
cut.
On-line reference programs
In
addition to those six we have discussed in detail, there are also many
web-based reference systems which thus work both for Windows and Macs.
Most of these work mainly as web storage sites; you establish an account
and can then save references to this site. Many of them are basically
social media, the idea being that these reference lists should be made
available to the public or to friends, although they may also be
personal (cf. also WorldCat which has the same "share a list" option
over titles you have found).
One such web-based system is used at a number of American campuses and may be of some interest, RefWorks. It
can search in many sources and store metadata from web pages. Many
catalogues also have a "RefWorks" export option alongside EndNote. It
integrates with Word and rtf files. In many (most?) cases, a university
will take out a campus-wide subscription to RefWorks so students can
use it for free, if not, you can get an individual account for $100.
Only the site licence allows you to store full text attachments to your
reference. It is thus a bit more expensive than others at the same
level, but appears to be a solid option.
However, most of the other web-based solutions seem to be
directed at the natural sciences and can only search sources relevant
to them, and/or are Unix solutions that require technical competence
most of us lack. They do not seem to be terribly relevant for academics
in our field, as far as I can glean from their web pages (thus Connotea, I
Librarian, refbase,
Bebop/BibTex, RefDB, Wikindx, etc.). If someone has experience to the contrary, it would be useful to know. There is a list over different such systems in Wikipeda.
July 2010
