A New Reference Manager to Watch

Nearly two years ago, I ran this series on a bunch of reference managers available in both commercial and open source models. Some things have changed since then, and others have not. OpenOffice.org Bibliographic has pretty much stagnated, Bibus has undergone incremental improvements, and Zotero has leap-frogged ahead to a function-rich 2.0 beta and survived a lawsuit from the makers of Endnote (which remains the commercial standard for reference management).

Today, a post at Bora Zivkovic's Blog Around the Clock higlights yet another new bibliographic offering, Mendeley. It is free, but not open source, and still in the beta stage, but it looks like it might offer some interface improvements over programs like Zotero and Endnote. Definitely worth following - do any of you readers have experience with Mendeley?

Zotero in the news. . .

And this time, because of a lawsuit from Thomson Reuters. Here's hoping this turns out for the best! Thanks to Mike Taylor for pointing out this news item (also here on Nature).

The basic gist of the lawsuit, apparently, is that the latest beta version of Zotero imports the Endnote style files, an alleged violation of the Endnote user agreement, among other things. Thomson Reuters alleges that the "reverse engineering" of their files (and allegedly, part of the software) is illegal. . .we'll see how this pans out, but I am not sure if I see the difference between what Zotero did and the file format translation capabilities of programs like Microsoft Office, etc.

Reference Managers on Parade - Part I

Everyone has a massive reference library, but few know how to manage it. Ideally, you want an application that will let you record all of your papers and import formatted citations into a document. In the upcoming series of posts, I'm going to review some reference managers, both open source and commercial.

Endnote
This program is the classic reference management program, and probably one of the most widely supported by publishers. It has been around for years now, and it shows the polish and feature richness that you would expect for a mature program. This is not an open source or free program, but I include it here just as a standard of comparison.
Pros: The Cite-While-You-Write feature is quite handy; this tool allows you to build your paper's reference list automatically while you type the paper (hence the name for this feature!). Also, Endnote has a very broad output styles database, and it is quite easy to build reference styles (JVP even has a style available from the journal website). You can format italics within each bibliographic entry. It is quite easy to import references from journal websites, too. Available for both Windows and the Mac OS.
Cons: It's expensive - $250 to download, and $300 (oops, I mean $299.95) to have a physical copy shipped to you. Also, there are occasional functionality issues if you try to run the program under WINE (and Cite-While-You-Write doesn't work in OpenOffice.org). No native Linux version is available.
The Bottom Line: If you can afford it, Endnote is the way to go. It has polish and pizazz, and it is widely supported. Linux users are better off looking elsewhere, though.