Tuesday, May 20, 2008

My Citation Management System: The Basics

If you are an academic, you need citation management software. It's as
essential as a pen and tweedy elbow patches (ok more essential than even
that). If you are in doubt, consider how much of your life you want to
spend typing in citations into a reference list, in the exact right
format. Then how much you want to spend checking that each citation in the
text has a one-to-one correspondence with an item in the reference list.
There are lots of software solutions, and more all the time. The bare
minimum it must have is this:
* Be able to download citations off the internet (either directly or by
importing) - I only have to type in 1 in 20 by hand, and it's a lot easier
to check something than to type it in correctly (but you do have to check
it) Plus a bunch of metadata comes along for free, like keywords and the
abstract.
* Stores them in a pool that is searchable, sortable, etc and can be
reused for multiple projects
* Can generate reference lists and ideally in-text citations in many
predefined formats. Because it's very nice to have the ability both to
have a big assist with matching your target style, such as APA 5th (though
you *always* have to double check it), and to rapidly switch the style if
you decide to submit to another journal (Nature here I come!!)
I use a program called EndNote. It is powerful and well-supported, and
I've found it easy to use. The one drawback is that it is incredibly
expensive. If you can't get it through your academic connections you
probably won't be able to afford it. One alternative that is also well
supported is called RefWorks. At least at Queen's, it comes for *free*,
and seems to be somewhat intergrated with the library system which is a
plus. Another excellent thing about it is that it's on the web, so you can
access your references whereever you go. A disadvantage I can see to that
is the slight clunkiness of web-based applications, and also that it isn't
stored locally, so backing it up might be more of a procedure. But the
biggest disadvantage is that I don't know its disadvantages.
Advanced questions to ask about any such tool:
Does it let you:
* Do literature searches within the application?
* Do searches within your own past reading? (like being able to google
your brain)
* Do an operation on multiple records at once?
* Add additional fields to a citation record, like to make your own
tagging system?
* Allow for multiple databases/directories?
* Do clever search and replace?
EndNote is lightning fast in its operations, even with a list of 10s of
thousands of citations (I've tried it).It's quite customizable, in a
user-friendly way, and it has lots of support for various filters and
templates people have produced. Best of all is that it can hook into
online databases and suck down citations directly - I've found that ISI
Web of Science almost *always* has the journal article I'm looking for,
and any number of university libraries can contribute book citations. I've
been using EndNote all the way along and so far it hasn't done me wrong.
(ok in a couple of niggling ways)
So EndNote lets you make separate databases, as many as you want, and
those are useful for many things, such as doing a specialized lit search.
However my approach is to put all my citations into a couple of big pools,
that are used for all my papers. That's the most flexible way: it means I
can search, sort and edit them all at once. And reuse the same citatioins
in different papers. There are two major databases, which I will talk
about individually in the next couple of posts:

My Citation Management System: Read

My Citation Management System: To Read Someday/Maybe

2 comments:

Liz said...

EndNote is fantastic that way. The only trouble I find is that it's very difficult to use if you work on more than one machine. I tend to find articles and read them at the lab on one computer, but when I'm writing and need to access the database I'm often on my laptop at home or in a coffee shop.

I haven't tried keeping the database on a flash drive I can move between computers rather than a harddrive, so maybe that's the thing to try next.

D said...

Excellent point! Which I don't know of an easy answer to (of course the refworks solution requires that you have internet whereever you go) You can try your own jerry-ringed system to keeping it synced, moving files around and such, or run it off the flash drive as you suggest (using the computers as backup basically).

One more piece of possibly relevant information: apparently endnote can sync with a palm pilot. I can't immediately see it, but I think you could use that to facilitate moving between two computers (palm software already deals with most of the tricky issues around synchronizing databases)