I am a historian.
I have a question about Reference Management Software. I do not use RMS; not because I am afraid of technology, but because the system I have has worked well for me, while writing my PhD, publishing two books and a bunch of articles. My method is to read books and article on paper, and write out notes on legal pads in cursive using a fountain pen. For newspaper articles, I print them out and put them in a three-ring binder; for archival materials, I use a combination of a file cabinet and legal pads. I don't particularly want to evangelize for my method, but it works well for me. I've tried other methods, but they don't work so well, in the same way I've tried driving an automatic transmission and it doesn't work for me so well as a manual transmission.
I've tried RMS (especially Zotero) but I've never found them particularly useful, nor have I found any problem with my pre-computer method. I am not opposed to computers (obviously, I am here) and I type my writings on a computer and download and print journal articles with a computer.
However, I have increasingly come across arguments like the following (from Wendy Laura Belcher,
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks):
QuoteIt's impossible to overemphasize the importance of such software to your productivity, happiness, and ethical obligations. You simply must use reference-management software (RMS). No ifs, ands, or buts! Once set up, these programs are so much easier to use, not to mention more accurate. Simply highlight a title and download. That's it—no
typing. While citations used to take five hundred seconds to produce by hand, with errors, with
RMS they now take five seconds.
I get the possibility of introducing errors by writing, but the biggest danger for me is introducing errors by reading--something that no software has been able to eliminate. And for me, the process of manually processing research materials (taking notes) is a key part of mentally processing the research materials. The above quote seems to imply that somebody is working off a computer file, not hard copies.
So my question is: is there a reason to use RMS, other than the fact that other people use it? If I am happy with my method, is there a reason to change?
(I am not opposed to technology. I use technology if I think it helps--for example, I post some readings on the CMS instead of making xeroxed course books at the copy center. But I don't use technology if I don't think it helps--I still prefer to write on the chalk board instead of using PowerPoint. Or, as noted, I use a manual transmission, but I also use GPS on my smartphone instead of the old AAA maps.)
I'm in a very different field, but I can't imagine not using software for this. The program I use, Papers, does much more than manage references-- it lets me keep all my articles organized in collections automatically by keyword, makes them fully searchable, lets me highlight and take notes on the PDFs, lets me cite them in any journal style (and switch to a different style if I have to resubmit elsewhere), lets me share them easily with others, etc. It also provides cloud back-up so I can never lose it. I've been using various versions of this software since I started grad school in 2006, and have amassed over 7000 articles in my library during that time-- Not a manageable number with any non-software system.
Quote from: Puget on June 06, 2022, 02:55:36 PM
I've been using various versions of this software since I started grad school in 2006, and have amassed over 7000 articles in my library during that time-- Not a manageable number with any non-software system.
That's the clincher for me. I flirted with RMS in grad school, but I didn't care for it at the time. Now, though, I have waaaaaaaaaaaaay too many articles and books hanging around, and I've given up on my hierarchical filing system because it ended up making things harder to find.
So: although I don't have anything to recommend, I'm checking in here, cap in hand. I don't mind generating my own lists of works cited in whatever style (although it can definitely be a pain), but I'm getting desperate for some file organization. Since abandoning my hierarchy, I've resorted to a folder for what I've read and one for what's to read, but that's not ideal.
I think I'm not as good at using my RMS as Puget is, but my philosophy is broadly the same: I can organize references according to which project they're relevant for (or teaching, too--which week are we discussing which articles, which makes lesson planning more frictionless), and I don't have to worry about formatting them or re-formatting them. Sometimes when writing things with page-count restrictions but no style guide I play around with a number of different formatting options to find one that minimizes page count, which is very nice.
It's also really good for lit searches. I don't need to remember which article discussed which topic; I can just look for keywords, and then sort by journal or year published or author. I can easily limit my search to a particular author, too: 'I know Bock wrote about this, but I don't remember where or when--let's just look at only the Bock articles.'
I don't use them at all, and I'm pretty prolific. So my conclusion is that either way is fine.
Is anyone else put off by claims like that in the article above, This product is a must for fulfilling your ethical obligations?
Quote from: Ancient Fellow on June 08, 2022, 03:27:50 AM
Is anyone else put off by claims like that in the article above, This product is a must for fulfilling your ethical obligations?
Yeah, that claim is silly on its face. Plenty of scholars before the invention of RMS managed to fulfill their ethical obligations just fine, and I'm convinced that I (who find value in compiling bibliographies by hand and taking notes in paper notebooks) have, too.
If you are going to do it, use the one that is supported for free by your library. The systems are not so different and the bibliograpies can be exported to other software if you ever need to.
I started using Reference Management Software in 1983, when everything was still print. We were able to do that because we switched the second floppy drive for a hard drive when that became possible. The process of entering the information as one read and digested the article is what made it stick. Nowadays I just add the articles with a click from an online database search, completely undigested, so that I can add it to the bibliography of articles and have that format precisely according to the specifications the journal provides.
A question for those of you who use an RMS: can they deal with the arbitrary capitalization rules for titles imposed by different reference styles? APA, for instance, requires sentence-style capitalization for article titles, while Chicago (my fav) capitalizes all words except for conjunctions and articles.
I've never bothered to find out, in part because I find the act of compiling a bibliography usefully mindless -- it occupies just enough of my mind to let ideas work themselves out somewhere in my subconscious. I can see the value of being able to search by keyword, but I suspect that even if I adopted an RMS, I'd still do bibliographies by hand.
Quote from: traductio on June 08, 2022, 04:57:38 AM
A question for those of you who use an RMS: can they deal with the arbitrary capitalization rules for titles imposed by different reference styles? APA, for instance, requires sentence-style capitalization for article titles, while Chicago (my fav) capitalizes all words except for conjunctions and articles.
I've never bothered to find out, in part because I find the act of compiling a bibliography usefully mindless -- it occupies just enough of my mind to let ideas work themselves out somewhere in my subconscious. I can see the value of being able to search by keyword, but I suspect that even if I adopted an RMS, I'd still do bibliographies by hand.
The RMS does all that at the output stage. Each journal provides a set of rules, and the software makes the data fit that format. Your personal database is stored in a generic format.
Here is an example of how you would select references for your bibliography and output them in the journal style.
https://guides.library.fresnostate.edu/endnote/output (https://guides.library.fresnostate.edu/endnote/output)
It is literally four simple steps: click on the articles you want, select the journal or format you want, copy and paste.
Why would you do that manually?
Quote from: Hibush on June 08, 2022, 06:46:47 AM
Quote from: traductio on June 08, 2022, 04:57:38 AM
A question for those of you who use an RMS: can they deal with the arbitrary capitalization rules for titles imposed by different reference styles? APA, for instance, requires sentence-style capitalization for article titles, while Chicago (my fav) capitalizes all words except for conjunctions and articles.
I've never bothered to find out, in part because I find the act of compiling a bibliography usefully mindless -- it occupies just enough of my mind to let ideas work themselves out somewhere in my subconscious. I can see the value of being able to search by keyword, but I suspect that even if I adopted an RMS, I'd still do bibliographies by hand.
The RMS does all that at the output stage. Each journal provides a set of rules, and the software makes the data fit that format. Your personal database is stored in a generic format.
Here is an example of how you would select references for your bibliography and output them in the journal style.
https://guides.library.fresnostate.edu/endnote/output (https://guides.library.fresnostate.edu/endnote/output)
It is literally four simple steps: click on the articles you want, select the journal or format you want, copy and paste.
Why would you do that manually?
Thanks.
As for why I'd do it manually, it's because -- for me, at least -- compiling a bibliography has a usefully meditative quality, especially for book-length projects. (I'm a humanities-oriented communication scholar.) I often establish the bibliography as I think through the structure of an argument -- making my list helps me think through organization, flow, and so on.
I suspect that most people approach bibliographies very differently! My grad students often send me drafts with things like "[REFERENCE HERE]" in their texts, which drives me bonkers. I tell them I want to
see the reference, not a meta-reference. That's never an issue when I write because I always have the running bibliography.
Quote from: traductio on June 08, 2022, 07:57:36 AM
I suspect that most people approach bibliographies very differently! My grad students often send me drafts with things like "[REFERENCE HERE]" in their texts, which drives me bonkers. I tell them I want to see the reference, not a meta-reference. That's never an issue when I write because I always have the running bibliography.
I sometimes do [REFERENCE HERE] because I
know that in the depths of my articles folder somewhere I have that one study by that one woman who showed that [phenomenon], but I don't want to lose the flow of crafting the argument [question]--> [phenomenon] --> [other phenomenon] --> [connection??] --> [hypothesis]. So I remind myself I still need to cite [phenomenon] and then keep going.
As for runnng bibliographies, my reference manager (Mendeley) integrates really nicely with Word and LaTeX, so I can just type the citation key--which I've set generate automatically to lastnameYear any time I add a new reference--and then I get the reference in text, and the bibliography at the end updates by itself.
Quote from: ergative on June 08, 2022, 08:21:30 AM
Quote from: traductio on June 08, 2022, 07:57:36 AM
I suspect that most people approach bibliographies very differently! My grad students often send me drafts with things like "[REFERENCE HERE]" in their texts, which drives me bonkers. I tell them I want to see the reference, not a meta-reference. That's never an issue when I write because I always have the running bibliography.
I sometimes do [REFERENCE HERE] because I know that in the depths of my articles folder somewhere I have that one study by that one woman who showed that [phenomenon], but I don't want to lose the flow of crafting the argument [question]--> [phenomenon] --> [other phenomenon] --> [connection??] --> [hypothesis]. So I remind myself I still need to cite [phenomenon] and then keep going.
I suspect that's what my students do, too, and I'm always encouraging them to harness whatever flow works best for their writing. (I also suspect that not everyone finds bibliographies as meditative as I do.) I think in my students' case, though, I just wish they'd go back and fill in the reference by the time they send me a draft!
Quote from: ergative on June 08, 2022, 08:21:30 AM
Quote from: traductio on June 08, 2022, 07:57:36 AM
I suspect that most people approach bibliographies very differently! My grad students often send me drafts with things like "[REFERENCE HERE]" in their texts, which drives me bonkers. I tell them I want to see the reference, not a meta-reference. That's never an issue when I write because I always have the running bibliography.
I sometimes do [REFERENCE HERE] because I know that in the depths of my articles folder somewhere I have that one study by that one woman who showed that [phenomenon], but I don't want to lose the flow of crafting the argument [question]--> [phenomenon] --> [other phenomenon] --> [connection??] --> [hypothesis]. So I remind myself I still need to cite [phenomenon] and then keep going.
As for runnng bibliographies, my reference manager (Mendeley) integrates really nicely with Word and LaTeX, so I can just type the citation key--which I've set generate automatically to lastnameYear any time I add a new reference--and then I get the reference in text, and the bibliography at the end updates by itself.
Same on both.
I always use "CITE" for these, so I can do a search and easily find the places I need to fill in citations. Usually this is for background info, where I know I have review articles in my collection I can cite for that point, and just don't want to take the time in the moment to find and insert the actual citations.
Like other posters above, I prefer to do my bibliographies and notes myself, and have a combo hard copy/digital method for tracking my sources and ideas. I work in an interdisciplinary humanities field, so source types can be quite varied, from books and articles to primary sources like manuscripts and art. My organizing them and taking care of citation/documentation myself helps my organize my thoughts.
While working as an EA in a pharma lab, I built a ground-up citation file for one of the lab directors.
She had a lot of .pdfs that needed to be entered, and I probably did about 50 of them to set up naming styles, etc.
The trouble was, it was saved to an all-shared drive so her lab folks could also access it, and it wasn't saved in a separate file by itself with the indexed .pdfs tied to the software--the overall office owned the software, so some part of her materials were linked into the underground parking garage that was the building's "programs" files.
When she got a new job and wanted to replicate her library (she was kindly leaving the original so the lab folks could still get into it) and move it with her, it was a bit of a conjoined-twin-separation level surgery.
I think IT finally managed it, but it was tricky.
So--cautionary tale, be sure you have it in a succinct location that can be moved separately if you also share it within your lab or with other labs in your department.
Especially if you're currently applying out.
M.
Quote from: mamselle on June 08, 2022, 10:40:51 AM
While working as an EA in a pharma lab, I built a ground-up citation file for one of the lab directors.
She had a lot of .pdfs that needed to be entered, and I probably did about 50 of them to set up naming styles, etc.
The trouble was, it was saved to an all-shared drive so her lab folks could also access it, and it wasn't saved in a separate file by itself with the indexed .pdfs tied to the software--the overall office owned the software, so some part of her materials were linked into the underground parking garage that was the building's "programs" files.
When she got a new job and wanted to replicate her library (she was kindly leaving the original so the lab folks could still get into it) and move it with her, it was a bit of a conjoined-twin-separation level surgery.
I think IT finally managed it, but it was tricky.
So--cautionary tale, be sure you have it in a succinct location that can be moved separately if you also share it within your lab or with other labs in your department.
Especially if you're currently applying out.
M.
This is not an issue with modern software-- it is all in cloud storage and synchs across devices.
Thanks for the replies.
I have to say that I am not convinced that it would be worth the time and effort to use an RMS. Besides the if-its-not-broke-why-fix-it aspect, I think some of this might be because of the type of research I do. It seems that people who like RMS tend to use a bunch of articles they have in PDF form. I am a historian, although I have also published in the zone between history and literary criticism. In my books or articles, maybe a quarter of my citations are to journal articles (some of them in PDF but others in actual journals or xeroxes); a quarter to books and unpublished dissertations and theses; a quarter to newspaper articles; a quarter to archival material. Being able to link to a PDF of an article does not seem all that important since it still leaves most of my sources unaccounted for.
I find the process of actually grappling with creating the citation an important part of the intellectual process of assimilating and analyzing the source itself. For what it is worth, I enjoy writing footnotes.
I also find the process of compiling a bibliography somewhat useful as a meditative technique. Also, I have found that many of my articles and books do not have a full bibliography. My last book had extensive footnotes and only a short listing of books that might be useful for further research.
I, too, found the claim that there was an ethical imperative to use RMS strange. I was taught to enter my sources as I write, so any plagiarism would either be intentional or cognitive (i.e., forgetting how much of one's argument derives from another). I cannot see how RMS would prevent either of these.
Please note, I am not dismissing RMS for those who find them useful. But I am still not convinced that they would be useful for me. For example, I found the link provided by Hibush to be much more confusing and difficult than just manually entering a reference in my m.s.
It is interesting to see the different approaches to interacting with the literature while writing.
The part where you are actually formulating your ideas is well supported in my experience. I actually do more of that in the grant-proposal stage. That is where I have to get an accurate picture of the current state of knowledge, then find the most interesting tractable unknown to address next, and persuade the reviewers that my approach is a high priority for funding. In that part, I have units consisting of a sentence with an idea from a source, and the tag associated with the source. I move those around to develop a well-supported story. I can change the sentences to fit the story better, then click on the tag to read the original and make sure my new assessment of that work is correct.
That approach may work in other fields as well. I end up interacting with the literature better that way.
As far as the type of source, I think all the software is pretty flexible. EndNote is for sure.I don't even think they have to be written works. You have the option of adding any electronic file, not just the PDF of an article. Or a link to an online resource (e.g. a DOI). You enter whatever notes you want with the file. With journal articles it is just simplified a bit, in that you can do a literature search, select the articles you want and import them to your main bibliography. I think most people do as Puget indicated and keep it all in cloud storage, perhaps mirroring locally if connectivity is imperfect.
Footnotes...RMS will not help at all!
RMSs also facilitate anti-scholarship. Students probably do this a lot. You write the story you want ex nihilo. Then you google some of your key assertions. Pick a couple of articles whose titles appear supportive (or vaguely relevant) and pop them in there. Blammo a well-cited term paper without doing any reading at all.
If you enjoy contemplating every comma, semicolon and capital letter in the reference list of your manuscript, then an RMS will lessen that pleasure. I'm perhaps at the other extreme, comfortable in the knowledge that the software generates a list acceptable to the publisher, I don't even have to look at it. I dealt with the ideas in the body of the text.
The grad students I write with use Mendeley, so I figure I should learn it but haven't so far. It is hard to edit or add to the references outside of Mendeley, because they are all in a block. I add my own references to the end and ask them to fix it. I like the feature in google scholar where you can choose how to cite (APA, Chicago, etc.) and so I cut and paste from that. But those sometimes have typos in them. I store all my pdfs in dropbox. I enjoy working on the reference section - I do that when I don't feel like writing. My references are immaculate.
Quote from: Hibush on June 08, 2022, 01:19:05 PM
As far as the type of source, I think all the software is pretty flexible. EndNote is for sure.I don't even think they have to be written works. You have the option of adding any electronic file, not just the PDF of an article. Or a link to an online resource (e.g. a DOI). You enter whatever notes you want with the file.
But does there have to be a file? The better half of the sources I work with do not have any file. They are newspaper articles, archival materials, books, etc., that exist either as physical objects, xeroxes, microfilm, or as notes scrawled on my notepad.
For example, here is a citation from the Public Records Office at the British National Archives in Kew:
PRO 1/3, 25 June 1840 Workmen to Palgrave
I have not actually used that document (I took it from the the Archive's guide to citation), but when I have used the PRO I generally sat down in the reading room and took notes on what I read. Would I be able to use RMS to manage citations like this?
(Yes, I realize that I could take notes on a computer, or scan a microfilm to PDF, take a picture on my phone, etc., but I find the process of taking notes in longhand--besides being what I was trained to do--a good way of processing the material mentally.)
QuoteFootnotes...RMS will not help at all!
Do you mean that it is not possible to make footnotes? As a historian, most of my references are in footnote (or endnote) form.
QuoteIf you enjoy contemplating every comma, semicolon and capital letter in the reference list of your manuscript, then an RMS will lessen that pleasure. I'm perhaps at the other extreme, comfortable in the knowledge that the software generates a list acceptable to the publisher, I don't even have to look at it. I dealt with the ideas in the body of the text.
As a former copy editor, I actually do enjoy this. But I also agree with Dismal. Sometimes I spend time on my citations when I don't have anything to write, but I need to work on my research. It is productive and allows me to dedicate time to my research, but doesn't require actually writing.
It doesn't have to be a file. You can add entries manually, without any digital file associated. You'd be typing in those authors and titles by hand either way, but if you type them into the reference manager you don't have to type them again every time you cite them in the future.
(One reason people are talking so much about PDFs and files is that RMSs have pretty good metadata scraping tools, and so if you drag and drop a PDF into the reference manager it will automatically populate author, title, year, journal, volume, page numbers, DOI, etc. This is great, except when it for some reason gets things hilariously wrong, and insists that an article about underwater basketweaving is in fact a report on some neurosurgery technique. I have no idea why those errors crop up, but I've learned to check all the metadata whenever I add a PDF, and correct it as needed.)
Reference managers can absolutely handle footnotes! Or endnotes! Just choose the citation style in your Word plugin and it will pop things in footnotes or endnotes as needed. It won't write the associated commentary that goes in the footnote or endnote for you, which is perhaps what Hibush meant, tongue-in-cheekily. You'd still have to write that yourself.
I wonder how productive it actually is to spend time on citations because it's a way of being productive when you don't have anything to write. Why spend the time doing something by hand that could be done faster and automatically? (But then, I count my time reformatting my LaTeX documents as 'writing' so probably I shouldn't criticise too hard here.)
I'm a historian too. I've never really used Zotero as a way to organize references or keep track of them as I do research. I only use it when I'm going to submit something and then it handles the formatting of the notes and generates a bibliography. Otherwise, you cut out or move a paragraph and you've got an orphan ibid you have to fix...etc...etc. Most people would probably find that inefficient, but there's something about the way my brain works that makes it much slower for me if I'm trying to organize and catalogue things as I go.
Quote from: ergative on June 09, 2022, 05:52:18 AM
This is great, except when it for some reason gets things hilariously wrong, and insists that an article about underwater basketweaving is in fact a report on some neurosurgery technique. I have no idea why those errors crop up, but I've learned to check all the metadata whenever I add a PDF, and correct it as needed.)
Yeah, even on a more basic level, Zotero always messes stuff up and you still need to check through the footnotes but going through and fixing a few errors is much easier for me than doing it all myself.
Quote from: Caracal on June 09, 2022, 06:58:55 AM
I'm a historian too. I've never really used Zotero as a way to organize references or keep track of them as I do research. I only use it when I'm going to submit something and then it handles the formatting of the notes and generates a bibliography. Otherwise, you cut out or move a paragraph and you've got an orphan ibid you have to fix...etc...etc. Most people would probably find that inefficient, but there's something about the way my brain works that makes it much slower for me if I'm trying to organize and catalogue things as I go.
In my engineering field, end notes are ordered according to citation order. One time before I started using an RMS, a collaborator added a ton of references to a proposal on page 3 of 15. I just threw in the towel on fixing the bibliography and got EndNote for future projects.
Quote from: pgher on June 09, 2022, 07:49:51 AM
Quote from: Caracal on June 09, 2022, 06:58:55 AM
I'm a historian too. I've never really used Zotero as a way to organize references or keep track of them as I do research. I only use it when I'm going to submit something and then it handles the formatting of the notes and generates a bibliography. Otherwise, you cut out or move a paragraph and you've got an orphan ibid you have to fix...etc...etc. Most people would probably find that inefficient, but there's something about the way my brain works that makes it much slower for me if I'm trying to organize and catalogue things as I go.
In my engineering field, end notes are ordered according to citation order. One time before I started using an RMS, a collaborator added a ton of references to a proposal on page 3 of 15. I just threw in the towel on fixing the bibliography and got EndNote for future projects.
That sounds like a nightmare.
Once I was editing a volume and one of the authors, despite clear instructions to the contrary, sent a chapter with endnotes. (I had requested Chicago author-date.) Worse yet, he created the endnotes
by hand, rather than using his word processor to insert them. Worse still, half-way in (there were more than a hundred), he doubled a number -- there were two notes numbered 44. I didn't trust him to convert his notes to in-text citations, so I did the whole durn thing myself.
Quote from: traductio on June 09, 2022, 08:19:06 AM
Quote from: pgher on June 09, 2022, 07:49:51 AM
Quote from: Caracal on June 09, 2022, 06:58:55 AM
I'm a historian too. I've never really used Zotero as a way to organize references or keep track of them as I do research. I only use it when I'm going to submit something and then it handles the formatting of the notes and generates a bibliography. Otherwise, you cut out or move a paragraph and you've got an orphan ibid you have to fix...etc...etc. Most people would probably find that inefficient, but there's something about the way my brain works that makes it much slower for me if I'm trying to organize and catalogue things as I go.
In my engineering field, end notes are ordered according to citation order. One time before I started using an RMS, a collaborator added a ton of references to a proposal on page 3 of 15. I just threw in the towel on fixing the bibliography and got EndNote for future projects.
That sounds like a nightmare.
Once I was editing a volume and one of the authors, despite clear instructions to the contrary, sent a chapter with endnotes. (I had requested Chicago author-date.) Worse yet, he created the endnotes by hand, rather than using his word processor to insert them. Worse still, half-way in (there were more than a hundred), he doubled a number -- there were two notes numbered 44. I didn't trust him to convert his notes to in-text citations, so I did the whole durn thing myself.
It was absolutely a nightmare. It happened in, I think, 2005 and it still makes a big impression on me. It's a story I tell all my students as well, to convince them to use something, anything, to avoid that situation.
Reference manager software makes sense if you're likely to accumulate and use thousands of references on closely related topics during your career. In fields where it's common to publish 3-4 papers a year, I suspect RMS is almost essential. My partner would be devastated if he lost his Endnote file; I suspect he'd happily spend $1000 or more a year for Endnote if the library didn't provide it.
I used Endnote for several years, but found it constricting. In my field, publishing a paper a year and a book every 4-5 years is the norm at research universities. I need a good system for extensive note-taking while reading much more than a reference manager. Like others, I find the ability to pin cards to a board as I think through arguments valuable.
Do what works for you.
I've used Endnote for 22 years. I like it as a reference dump. It's great for that purpose.
Another vote for using RMS. I started my career using Endnote, but the cost of upgrades ate at me. Now I happily use Zotero and I do pay for the unlimited cloud storage of my PDFs, and love how it syncs in the cloud so I can use my home desktop, office desktop, and laptop and everything moves pretty seamlessly. It also allows me to share references and documents with my colleagues in shared libraries. In fact, this fall for my small graduate seminar I am likely to just dump all the readings in Zotero and share them with my students that way.
It is true that in my social science field I am working primarily with PDFs of journal articles. What I love about Zotero is that I recently had to reformat a bunch of citations from Chicago Author-Date to Nature style (a deeply interdisciplinary article). It was pretty easy. Zotero also facilitates my collaboration with colleagues when are all writing on one paper and adding references. Its integration with Google Docs for shared work is pretty good. I sound like a shill for Zotero but I am just a huge fan. And I almost forgot: the newest version of Zotero has built in PDF reading and annotation features that work incredibly well with the way I read and annotate (and search for annotations) in my reference database. And I love that I can just enter the DOI of an article and 90% of the time the fully complete record shows up in my database. Then, I click on the item and select "find available PDF" and it just does so (there's some sort of setting to point the search to a proxy at my university, so it validates me and then finds the articles in the available databases).
All this being said I can see where humanists like historians may have little use for this. If one is primarily a solo author, if one is writing for outlets that use more or less similar citation styles, and if the source material that needs to be cited comes with odd citation conventions, then RMS may not work. But Zotero seems to handle those things well, and I have found that, in most cases, the RMS handles about 90% of the references properly, and it's a simple matter to consult the Chicago Manual of Style or whatever to figure out the other 10%.