CiteULike is an online social bookmarking tool specifically made for academic papers. You can use your own tags to organize your citations and export citations to RefWorks or EndNote (or any other via RIS, a standard format) or an open source format (BibTeX) for use by other bibliographic management software. Some Social Bookmarking features in CiteULike include the ability to watch (track new articles appearing under a specific tag or by a known user) or create groups with an ability to collaboratively add references and have a discussion forum.
CiteULike may be best for: discovering relevant articles currently being used by the community.
CiteULike seems to lack: The ability to deal with legacy documents (those already on the user’s desktop)
Papers is an application intended to be the interface for searching, retrieving, reading, and organizing, and making notes on electronic documents. You conduct searches through the application to PubMed, the Web of Knowledge databases, Google Scholar and several other databases. Papers will find the full-text when available for citations found in its database. Legacy documents (those already on your computer) can be imported to Papers, and the citations for them can be found through the databases as well. Papers uses Mac’s built-in index (Spotlight) for full-text searching.
Papers may be best for: Mac users needing consistent retrieval from the host of journals accessed through Web of Knowledge databases and Google Scholar.
Papers seems to lack: The ability to create bibliographies without exporting citations to RefWorks or EndNote.
Quosa is an application intended to be the interface for searching, retrieving, reading and organizing electronic documents. Searches through Quosa happen in the database’s native search interface, meaning you can take full advantage of the search tools provided by the database. Quosa attempts to retrieve full text documents of the entire set of search results, even hundreds at a time, and renames them in a standard format. Quosa has a search alert feature which will re-run simple searches automatically and have the full text of those documents available to read without you even needing to execute a single command. Quosa creates its own index of the full text of documents. Quosa was developed for PubMed, and the company is working on expanding support for other databases.
Quosa may be best for: PubMed users seeking rich automatic retrieval of many articles at once.
Quosa seems to lack: the ability to find full-text for many of the journals available through the Web of Knowledge, since the automation process is journal-specific and must be done and re-done manually by the company for each journal and version. Quosa also seems to lack the ability to make notes.
Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps manage documents found online through the browser. It collects metadata (including citation information) and stores PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages for easier retrieval. Inputting documents to Zotero is very similar to making bookmarks to the web pages. The difference is that Zotero collects citation information and
instead of the actual PDF article, Zotero can store a “snapshot” of the document, which may actually be the PDF of the document. Otherwise, the bibliographic information from the article comes from the Journal’s web page for the article, not the article itself. Zotero is bound to the installation of Firefox, although those using multiple computers can install it on a portable version of Firefox and travel with their Zotero library on a USB drive.
Zotero may be best for: Researchers with few or no legacy documents on their computer.
Zotero seems to lack: A vast collection of output styles that can be found with RefWorks or EndNote. It also has no automation of document retrieval.
RefWorks is a web-based bibliographic management program. With RefWorks, you can create a personal, searchable database of citations. These citations may be formatted and merged into your Microsoft Word documents as footnotes or a custom bibliography. Because it is web-based (the bibliographic records reside on the web, not on your computer), it gives you access to your bibliographies from any computer connected to the Internet. Refworks has the ability to automatically import items from RSS feeds as bibliographic citations. UC e-links also works from within RefWorks, enabling full-text access to the articles. RefWorks can import references from other bibliographic management tools, making it a good companion program for CiteULike, Papers, and QUOSA, since these tools do not make bibliographies
RefWorks may be best for: undergraduates and researchers who do not currently use a bibliographic management software program. It may also be best for those working on multiple computers. Since references can be exported to EndNote, it can serve as a good temporary holding service for researching on a machine other than the user’s main writing computer (at the library, etc.)
RefWorks seems to lack: an efficient method for dealing with legacy documents, and will not have as many citation styles that may be required for publishing in some journals.
EndNote is designed to manage large collections of citations as “libraries” and can format Microsoft Word documents with inline citations and bibliographies in the most comprehensive array of citation styles possible. You may include a link to the full text of a document in any EndNote record, or configure it to use UC-eLinks to find online versions of them. EndNote can import records from all of the products on this list as well as many others, making it suitable as a companion tool for almost any other product.
EndNote may be best for: researchers needing the greatest variety of output styles.
EndNote seems to lack: automated retrieval and full-text searching of documents. Although libraries of citations are portable, the actual program is purchased for use on only one computer.
Tool |
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URL |
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Cost |
free |
$42 |
Paid for by UC Berkeley | free |
Paid for by UC Berkeley | $69.99 academic |
Mac |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
Windows |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Create Bibliography? |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
yes |
# of citation styles |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
14 |
1,087+ |
2,275+ |
Create inline citations in Word |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
yes |
Import method |
Bookmarklet to add individual articles as you access them. | Search through native interface import 1 at a time, manual download of article auto-linked to citation. | Search through native interface, import many at a time, automatic download of article linked to citation | Icon in address bar to add individual articles as you access them, Manual discovery of full text and manual link to citation. | Export feature of database to RefWorks format, or 1 at a time through UC-eLinks. | Search through EndNote, or export from native interface to EndNote format, many at a time. Manual discovery of full-text and manual link to citation. |
Tool |
||||||
Way to read full-text from citation |
Link to discover full text. | Both a link to locally saved article (if user has done this) or a link to discover full-text. | Both a link to locally saved article (if user has done this) or a link to discover full-text. | Both a link to locally saved article (if user has done this) or a link to discover full-text. | Link to discover full text | Both a link to locally saved article (if user has done this) or a link to discover full-text. |
Add personal notes? |
Notes field | make persistent notations in documents. | none (notes can be made with Adobe Acrobat Professional) | Notes field | Notes field | Notes field |
How it handles legacy documents (those saved on computer before using program) |
n/a |
Papers can attempt to retrieve citation information from several sources including PubMed or Web of Science or Google Scholar, or you can link the document to a manually found or entered citation. | Quosa will attempt to retrieve citation information from PubMed only. | User can manually create a link to the locally saved article. | n/a |
User can manually create a link to the locally saved article. |
Tool |
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Location of Database |
web-based | on local computer | on local computer | now on local computer, but roumored to be web-based in 2008 Q3 | web-based | on local computer |
Export Format |
BIbTeX, RIS | BibTeX, RIS, EndNote, Bookends | Articles to a folder, EndNote preserving links to articles, HTML file, RefWorks, Refman, Pro Cite, ProtoType, XML | Zotero RDF, MODS, BibTeX, EndNote, RIS, Dublin Core RDF, Wikipedia Citation Templates | EndNote, RefWorks, Reference Manager, BibTeX, Citation List, RefWorks, XML, Tab Delimited | Text, RTF, HTML, XML, EndNote |
Tool |
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Can others see your database without you doing anything? (exporting or transferring) |
yes |
no |
no |
no |
yes, you can set up password-based read-only access | no |
Works with Berkeley subscribed databases? |
No, it works one at a time from the article's web page | PubMed, Web of Science, plus Google Scholar | PubMed, Web of Knowledge, OVID databases. | No, it works one at a time from the article's web page | All databases with UC-eLinks can export to RefWorks. Lexis-Nexis has a button for it. | Many through import filters and "connection files" |
Works with new media? (web pages, podcaasts, blog postings, etc. |
No, only traditional academic formats | no |
Traditional formats plus web pages and "sound recordings" | Yes, an exhaustive list | yes |
yes |
Keeping current feature |
You choose to "watch" tags and users's lists via web site or RSS. | n/a |
Search alert feature. Automatically re-runs searches, fetches documents, and files them for you to read | n/a |
You set up an RSS feed as a folder to capture new items. You then move the items to your working folders. | n/a |
Copyright © 2008 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Comment Form. Last update:
05/07/08
