Question about Reference Management Software--should I use one?

[mamselle]

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.

[Puget]

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.

[jerseyjay]

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.

[Hibush]

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.

[Dismal]

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.

[jerseyjay]

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.)

Footnotes...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.

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.

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.

[ergative]

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.)

[Caracal]

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.

[Caracal]

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.

[pgher]

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.

[traductio]

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.

[pgher]

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.

[Vkw10]

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.

[euro_trash]

I've used Endnote for 22 years. I like it as a reference dump. It's great for that purpose.

[Tee_Bee]

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%.