REFERENCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS
AND HOW TO USE THEM
Written by Pooja Viswanathan
So much of research tends to be a sort of chaotic self-directed learning experience, little
nuggets of information coming from many different resources, sometimes with no way to tie
them all together. Our lives today are much improved by utility tools and software that go some
way in alleviating this problem. One quintessential tool that we will all use at some point in our
graduate studies is a reference management software. I use three. Let me tell you why.
I used some downtime at work (read:
while training animals for months and
months that disappeared into one another) to look at all the major reference management players. I prepared
a chart comparing their various features.
Many before me have prepared more
exhaustive charts and lists . Reference
management systems try to accomplish more than just managing references, so the most important thing
to consider before using these helpful
charts is which of the many available
functions you are likely to use. Ask
yourself these helpful questions:
• Do you work on multiple computers/
operating systems?
• Do you want to pay for one?
• Do you need it to organize your
library and/or citations?
• What software do you use to
write?
• Do you need to share your now extensively curated library or citations
with others?
10 | NEUROMAG | July 2016
The major functions can thus be reduced to reference manager, reference searcher, citation manager, and
life easy-maker. I regret to inform you
that I have yet to find the one software
to rule them all, but I have found a system that works. I found that Mendeley
takes care of many of these functions
the best. It starts with being available
as a standalone app for many platforms. This is helpful because I have
a Windows PC at work, a Macbook for
personal use, an Android tablet and an
iPhone. I have Mendeley on all of them
and can take any of my portable devices on my travels, to lab meetings,
or conferences and have my library
on hand. It is free, with some extra
features for paying users. The free
features are entirely sufficient for my
personal use and allow me to have a
shared folder with two lab colleagues.
Mendeley has a browser bookmarklet that allows me to save PDFs directly to Mendeley’s free 2GB web
storage option or my unlimited device storage. I ask it to kindly rename
my PDF files when it stores them so
that they all look neat and tidy and
not ‘sss9320495-4jfkmd-fk-off.pdf’. I
use Microsoft Word to do most of my
writing, but Mendeley offers support
for Open Office and LaTex and where it
does not, it offers flexible ways to add
citations in a few clicks. Mendeley has
a web version as well, where you can
search for papers in other members’
libraries and follow other members to
get your social media fix. It does not
quite hit the spot with free features
for collaborations, but this is precisely
how they draw in entire labs to pay
for the premium features. Mendeley
has a decent PDF viewer that allows
you to annotate and star while reading. You can search for words, authors,
titles, and journals to find the papers
you want. It also has a superb indexing
system, can extract meta data, finds
duplicates to clear, and offers a vast
library of citation styles you can personalize or edit.
Another program named Zotero is very
similar to Mendeley in all these features (although it only offers 300MB
of free web storage) and is open
source. I cannot speak for the stabil-