How to choose a reference manager

Reference managers have become an essential component of any researcher’s toolkit, enabling them to store, reproduce and share their bibliographic information quickly and easily. Compatibility with standard word processing software has potentially saved days of extra work, manually creating and formatting references.

Early Days
The first package, Refman from Thomson Reuters was launched as early as 1984 (reference from Wikipedia); wider adoption of reference management software didn’t occur until the mid-nineties when the connected electronic environment facilitated database linking to individual computers. For more reference manager history, see From Sci-Mate to Mendeley - a brief history of reference managers from Nature Network Blog, Trading Knowledge (which has since ceased trading).

Until this kind of software hit the mainstream, academics and publishers were sometimes even happy to incorporate freelance costs to pay for this fiddly data entry task to be completed rather than spend their own valuable time, particularly when dealing with a book or paper with hundreds of citations.

Looking for extra value
These days, the core functionality of reference managers is largely taken for granted as a software commodity for compiling bibliographies. As mentioned in an earlier post, the value of reference managers seems to lie in their functionality to share reading lists and authored papers, as well as to provide two-way visibility for librarians to observe the publishing, reading and sharing behaviour of their faculty and students.

Choosing the right tool
There are various comparison articles for reference managers on the web, including a fairly comprehensive listing on Wikipedia, but as you can imagine these go out of date quickly as the publishers of the software add extra layers and functionality. Hence, as a librarian selecting a reference manager for your faculty members can be tricky, matching it to their requirements. There are 5 basic factors to consider when making the selection:

1. User interface (UI) – if it is simple and easy to use, it will save your end users a lot of time; if the UI is poorly conceived, it may be more of a hindrance to their productivity
2. Help – it’s always worth checking the Help or FAQ sections of the reference manager website (e.g. http://support.mendeley.com). The more questions answered recently probably means the developers are listening actively to the users. Whether user-generated or ‘official’, webcasts and recorded how-to videos are an essential resource for tutorial purposes. Do a quick Google Video/YouTube search to find out if there are many available for your your reference manager options. 
3. Plug-ins and APIs – check what kind of extra functionality it offers. Does it have an import from browser function, and can you also import old reference data from another reference manager? Are there developers making new applications on the back of an open API that will have their own benefits down the line?
4. Standalone or cloud-based? Many reference managers these days have both, but it’s worth checking if you need to be able to access your database of references remotely via a website, or on a mobile device such as the iPad/iPhone
5. The Future - where does it feel like the tool is going? By that I mean, does it look like it will be proactively developed based on user feedback and innovation, or does it seem like it will just be a case of ironing out bugs? UserVoice or similar user feedback platform add-ons are also a good way to see what developments have been suggested, which ones are now being developed into the tool and which ones were rejected. Also check how many software releases the product has had recently as that may give a good indication of the velocity of new functionality releases.

There has been a huge amount of interest in the newly launched Mendeley Institutional Edition from our library customers. The software offers user insights back to librarians to view what their faculty are reading, sharing and publishing on Mendeley. In addition, all end users are given a premium personal account, and it allows direct linking of the library's holdings to the end users within the software itself.

To address this interest, we have produced a comprehensive checklist for Mendeley and Mendeley Institutional Edition that you can use as a basis to compare other reference managers you may currently recommend, or are considering for your end users:

Sign up for a copy of the
Mendeley and Mendeley Institutional Edition
feature checklist here (this is a guide for institutions or
libraries considering reference manager options and functionality)

Additional comparisons

An mentioned above, there is a range of different comparisons around for reference managers. Below is a non-exhaustive selection of those:

Wikipedia entry dealing with the main reference managers around

EndNote/EndNote Web, Mendeley, RefWorks, Zotero Features Comparison from University of Wisconsin-Madison

Imperial College London comparison between  RefWorks, EndNote/EndNote Web, Zotero, RefMan and Mendeley

Checklist from Mendeley website, comparing the feature of Mendeley against EndNote, RefWorks and Zotero (features of the Institutional Edition can be found here)

Blog post from Dean Giustini (UBC) comparing RefWorks, Zotero and Mendeley