Bibliography Managers Save Aggravation

Any scientist who has ever published anything has had to wrestle with references. And the longer you’re in the field, the greater the problem grows. Card files spill over, file drawers bulge with reprints, and you shrink from preparing the next manuscript for publication because of the horrible job of assembling the relevant references. Scientists who are worn out from tackling this task constitute a ready-made market, and it’s no surprise that a number of software companies have sprung up to capitalize on it. There’ are at least 15 bibliography management software packages on the market today, ranging in price from about $200 to $500, and with a comparable range of features. Reference handling functions fall into two main categories: retrieval and formatting. Retrieval means the ability to find a particular reference when you need it. When you enter the last name of an author—say, “MacDonald”—most bibliography managers will find all relevant references with ease. Most Will also find all relevant references when you enter “MacDonald, John,” or “MacDonald, John, 1987.” If, however, you don’t happen to remember the name (or names) of the author(s), much less the specific title of the article or the year it was written, and recall vaguely only that it dealt with giant squid axons, you are going to have more trouble. Any bibliography manager will find citations by key fields—such as author, year, journal, title—or by combinations of such key fields. One indicator of a package’s usefulness is how many key fields you may use, and whether they can be used in combination, or only one at a time. The better packages will also allow you to enter a description or abstract for each citation in your database, and will search for any term in that, as well, thus allowing you to find all references to giant squids in 1987. Retrieval features to consider include: the number of fields allowed in a record (a field is an item of information, such as author’s name or year of publication), the length of a field (if you have multiple authors, it’s easy to overflow a 30-character name field), the number of fields allowed in a search, the ability to use an abstract or description field, the ability to edit or update records, and " the ease of adding new records to a bibliographic database. This last is important, because some packages accept only citations .that are in a particular format. While the programs may enable you to retrieve lists of references from an on-line database source, you’ may have to reformat them manually before you can include them in your personal database. You can organize your references using almost any software with database management capabilities, including Lotus 1-2-3 and other spreadsheets. Most database software will conduct search procedures sufficiently to allow you to retrieve specific references, though not all will let you use description/abstract fields in searches. Where bibliography managers come into their own is in the area of formatting. While most database software will do an adequate job of retrieving all records indexed under “MacDonald, John,” they will not be able to change “MacDonald, John, 1987,” into “J. MacDonald. 1987.” automatically. Anyone who has written for more than one journal has experienced the tedium of having to go laboriously through the “Literature Cited” section, changing the format of each citation. Most bibliography managers will do this for you, at least to some extent. Many have several of the most common formats built in; you merely tell the software.whether you prefer the J. of Psychology format or the Experimental Biology format, and the software does the rest. Some packages will also allow you to compose your own format, then alter all retrieved references to fit it. The number of word processing features available is also something to consider. Some bibliography packages merely retrieve citations and present them in one of a limited number of formats. If further adjustments are necessary., you must haul the citation list into your own word processor and do it by hand; the bibliography package doesn’t permit any editing. This means that you should be sure that all citation files are exportable in ASCII form, so that you can pull them into a word processing package for further work if necessary. Virtually all bibliography managers’ will export (and usually import) ASCII files. Check to be sure that the citation files can be updated and/or edited, and that this process is reasonably easy to do. Bibliography managers will vary in the speed with which they retrieve references, and in the number of references they can pack onto a single disk. Disk packing is of less importance if you have a hard disk, but it is always desirable to keep backups of valuable databases on floppies. Further refinements and features are also available. Some packages, such as REFERENCE MANAGER and Pro-Cite, offer separately purchased modules that link to specific on-line databases, such as the National Library of Medicine, and automatically format citations as they are retrieved from the on-line source. Some packages automatically alphabetize the citation list as it is assembled. Some, such as REFSYS, permit easy merging of citation databases or selected citations, so that you can create lists and sublists, or add new databases. Some packages will extract citations from text and automatically resequence the “Literature Cited” section. Which of these bibliography managers is the one for you? ProCite is the most popular at present, but that’s in part because it’s been around longest. Both Pro-Cite and REFERENCE MANAGER are very powerful, with enormous importing, retrieval, and formatting capabilities—if you’re willing to pay for them. The extra modules on both boost their already high prices. The much more modestly priced REFBASE is the only one of the packages listed here that works reasonably well on a computer with two floppy drives. If you have a Macintosh, you’re limited to three: ProCite, REFERENCE MANAGER, or the British import AUTO-BIBLIO. Of these, ProCite is the longest-running and thus, presumably, the best-developed. Not all the REFERENCE MANAGER modules are available for the Mac version. GET-A-REF is an excellent program in terms of features and documentation, and reasonably priced, but requires more user-fiddling than the more expensive packages; it’s a good choice for departments with multiplecopies of the program and a resident computer hacker. The British package ARCHIVIST is quite good at retrieval, though it is a memory hog; however, the formatting procedure is rather cumbersome. As with any other software purchase, the key to satisfaction is to analyze your needs carefully before buying. Many kinds of software on the market today are very specialized, for molecular design or plasmid engineering or whatever, and so appeal only to a limited number of scientists in a specific field. Many other packages are so patently intended for a general (for example, business) market that their utility for scientific work is questionable. But bibliography managers are a necessity for the active scientist. They pay for themselves in time and aggravation saved. Diana J. Gabaldon is assistant research professor at the Center for Environmental Studies, Arizona State University, and editor of Science Software.

Bibliography Managers Save Aggravation

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