Research Management Tools

~2013

Around the time I hit 30 papers in my literature review I decided I needed a better system for organizing my references and managing citations!

I spent a little time researching reference management tools. These tools are "designed to store, manage, and cite bibliographic references." There are a ton of options, it's a little overwhelming. I looked at four, including the three most popular and a promising newcomer to the market. All of these offer cloud backup storage, and collaboration tools. My research may help other students.

Here is a summary of what I have learned:

Zotero is open source and free. It has everything I need. Plus, there are extensions for Microsoft Word (totally awesome) and Firefox (awesome) and also for Safari/Chrome to add functionality, like picking up your tablet (iPad or otherwise) annotations on PDFs and saving them as digital notes. There's an option to pay for additional cloud storage.

Mendeley is another option-- it's beautiful and integrates even nicer with its extensions for Word and iOS app. It's owned by Elsevier and apparently there's some controversy there. It's free with paid options. It's the most streamlined of the options here, so if you don't want to have to do much extra work researching and installing extensions and apps, this is your winner.

EndNote is popular, and there's a free web version, but that's weak. The desktop version is very pricey. It's only halfheartedly recommended by those who use it. It has market share because it was early on the scene. Zotero reverse-engineered it and their desktop version is free.

Qiqqa (pronounced 'quick-er'-- the 'r' at the end because it's British) is beautiful and has a ton of features that are probably best for exploring new papers to read. It can take imported files from Zotero and other tools. It does everything Zotero and Mendeley do EXCEPT play nicely with the iPad. (It will sync with Android devices, though.) It's free, but there are paid features. It really works well for adding metadata (e.g. BibTeX info)-- it doesn't do it totally automatically, but it gives the user a good level of control to make it a fast, accurate process. It sorts your files really nicely, but makes many duplicates, so be careful if you're using it with Dropbox or another third party cloud storage applciation-- you'll run out of space quickly.Qiqqa has nice mind mapping brainstorming tools. I'll probably still use it when I'm looking for new reading material.

Ultimately, because it's open source and met my personal productivity and organization criteria (plays nicely with iPad, hierarchical file management), I chose Zotero with the ZotFile Firefox add-on to integrate with iPad and for better file management. Just for kicks I also got PaperShip (free iOS and Mac app that integrates with both Zotero and Mendeley).

So far Zotero is working great with the GWU Library online databases-- it sensed on its own that I was using a proxy server and just asked me to confirm before it automatically set up integrated access.

For more information on other reference management tools, see the the Wikipedia article comparing reference management tools.