A Quick Peek at Some Reference Managing Tools

Our discussion in class piqued my interest in what tools are available to help in managing all of the references and information needed to do research. Ideally I'd like something that lets me organize, search, browse, and reference publications with a minimum of overhead. I doubt there's such a thing as a perfect tool, but it looks like there are a lot of choices out there. Here is just a small sampling of what's available.

RefWorks - a web based tool for manage citations. As students of CU we get
free access to this resource (assuming we're on campus or VPN-ed into the campus network). http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/how/refworks.htm

EndNotes - This package does not appear to be free, however it is commonly used.I have no idea which one is better, but there are plenty of hits when you search Google for EndNote vs RefWorks.

JabRef - Open source bibliography reference manager. Uses BibTex as its native format giving tight integration with LaTeX.
http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

Wikindx - Open source bibliographic software. It can run on a desktop or web server. It seems to have a Wiki-like interface, however I'm still kind of fuzzy as to what you actually do with this software.
http://wikindx.sourceforge.net/

Also this WikiBooks entry on Bibliography Management with LaTeX seems to be a good starting point for finding BiBTeX compatible tools. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography_Management

Comments:

Feel free to post any comments here:

Last modified 3 October 2007 at 11:56 pm by LeeBecker