Citation Management Choices
I’m noticing people in the blogsphere struggling with choices among what seem like a plethora of options in the reference manager space, with Mendeley the latest entry.
Without choosing any particular winners, here’s some characteristics that I personally prioritize:
- Can I store the data I need to store? For me, this goes far beyond journal articles and books, and can include a wide range of primary source material.
- Can I easily import and export that data, in a form where I can easily reuse it elsewhere? This potentially goes beyond the raw metadata, but can and should also include the documents I write.
- Am I confident that the software will be around for the long-run? If it’s proprietary software, this by definition means I have to be supremely confident in the company and its business model, because the risk is the software simply goes away. If it’s free software, I’m much less concerned, but certainly the quality of the code-base and the health of the community that develops and maintains it are important prerequisites. For this reason, I have a strong bias in favor of open source software.
The answers to these questions will vary depending on where you are in the academic universe. People in the sciences, for example, typically don’t cite anything but secondary literature: journal articles and such. But they may have more demanding needs in terms of markup for things like math. Humanities, people, by contrast, will often deal with a much wider range of sources, sometimes in multiple languages. Applications like Mendeley and Zotero are really built by and for different communities of users.
That said, it’d be nice if applications could work on the problem I earlier outlined, as well as imagine server-based solutions that were not centralized (see laconica), so that users had more flexibility to use different tools.
