Thing 14 - Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike

Ah, referencing – I have always enjoyed this! I was obviously born to be a librarian…

The library I work in uses RefWorks, but my post doesn’t involve using it regularly, so I have really only a basic knowledge of it. I became more aware of it recently when we had issues regarding the changing of display of bib records in our Primo discovery system – we made some changes which had rather unintended effects on the references it exported via RefWorks, so then had to work to get a compromise between the two systems’ requirements.

I had an awareness that other referencing software is available, e.g. End Note, Reference Manager etc, but not much experience of using them, other than a very little at University. I hadn’t heard of any of the three free ones on trial in this week’s 23 things. I had a brief look at all three, to decide which to try:

Zotero – this looks very simple to use on the training video, and would be helpful for storing more than just references – it could be used for keeping track of your research in general.

Mendeley – this put me off as a desktop installation – I really don’t want any more desktop clutter unless I absolutely need it!

citeulike – this appealed more as it was online, but I wasn’t sure from a brief look that you could actually ‘cite while you write’ using this tool, so it’s usefulness might be limited. It was more of a sharing/organizational tool.  So, this is the one I decided to explore further. It took me a couple of attempts to realize that importing from the toolbar add-on only works if you use sites which support citeulike! Which is a shame. But you can do things manually if not. I found that this works well as yet another resource discovery/sharing tool – it was really useful to see what others who had tagged the same article as me had also read.

So, yt was interesting to explore these tools to get an idea of what students might be using if they’re not using RefWorks, and to realize that they may also have application for me in terms of storing references to articles/work for personal research. Currently any links to research I store tends to be in delicious, all bundled in with my other ‘stored web stuff’, but I wonder if I might get more usage from it if I separated it out a little. Picking the best online tool for the job can be tricky when there are so many out there!