CPD23 – Thing 14: Referencing Tools

I was quite looking forward to thing 14 as I’ve been grappling with EndNote all summer; helping with updating our support materials and investigating EndNote Web. I was interested to look at some of the free reference management services available – mainly to explore other options so that I can advise students better but partly because I really like EndNote so I wanted to see how other tools compare.

But first, EndNote. When I was doing my Masters I didn’t use a bibliographic management tool to organise my references. This wasn’t through lack of opportunity, but rather due to bad timing. We had an EndNote training session but by the time this was organised I’d already finished the literature review for my dissertation so carried on just typing in the references manually (I actually don’t really mind doing this and as I always reference as I go along it wasn’t too time-consuming anyway). However, for many students – researchers with thousands of references or just those who hate referencing – EndNote can be invaluable. At work we have just moved to version X4 of EndNote and I really like some of the additional features such as the full text search, which will find the full text of the articles in your EndNote library and attach the pdf to the relevant record, and the facility to import references from a folder of pdf files.

For this thing I decided to take a look at Mendeley. Of course I can’t fully compare a free tool with a commercial product such as EndNote but even so Mendeley stands up quite well against EndNote. It’s fairly straight forward to use and has quite a lot of the same functionality so will be a good alternative to EndNote to recommend to our students. When I have more time I will definitely try out Zotero as it will be useful to know about a few different tools when helping students and this looks like it could be quite a popular one.