Ten years ago I worked for the University, and was admittedly quite surprised about the academic world. One of the key pieces of academic research is reference management. These valuable assets are hard to manage, because formats are so changing, and sources so unlike, that the only way to prevent becoming crazy is using a robust reference management software. I was introduced to RefWorks, and then recalled my brother using EndNote. These are probably the biggest competitors in the professional Reasearch scenario, but they are expensive and probably an overkill for a freelance guy or an independent researcher. If this is your case, you might like to follow on and check the result of my own experience with these tools. back in 2014, I spent some time testing the following alternative tools:
- CiteUlike.org, a very nice online database for references, capable of exporting many different formats, but with no integration for MS Word or Open Office. This is important if you’re going to use the references with the ability to eventually change formats and/or add items. Bibsonomy.org is a similar tool, broader in applications, but even less powerful in reference formatting.
- Mendeley.com represents a step further in formatting, with an accurate result, and supposedly offering a Word plugin, but I couldn’t manage to install it. The browser tool to fetch references is a neat feature, and the standalone application a great piece of software, but I’m sorry, I needed the Word plugin. Besides this fact, Mendeley also uses a central server to store all your references, and if you reach the storage limit (big enough for me) then you have to start paying a monthly fee.
- Scholar’s Aid and Bibus are two cute little gadgets that could do the job, but they spend a lot of resources in doing more things, while they forget to focus on robustness and practicity. The quitting reason in both cases was the inability to import and export correctly. The Word integration is quite impressive in Scolar’s Aid, but not very flexible, while Bibus didn’t integrate very well in general.
- Zotero.org is very similar to Mendeley: it uses a local utility (in this case under the shape of a Firefox plugin), a Word / Open Office plugin, and a central server with a storage limit for free use. The main difference is… it works. The Word plugin is simple and functional, easy to use and very powerful, allowing you to format references as footnotes or endnotes, and allowing you to reformat lists in any desired format. Working in the cloud is good if you use different computers in different places and you want a single consistent reference database. The result of all this was I used Zotero for years, and felt very happy about it.
But I have recently found a red line for this tool. A local magazine just asked me to write an article, and I had the urge to write references in a very specific format. Custom formats in Zotero are a painful job, to the point that I couldn’t manage to do it. I tried to edit an existing format, but it didn’t work.
So here I am testing new tools again, ten years later, with the feeling of stepping back to the early years before WYSIWYG.
After some unsuccessful tinkering with native references in Word or LibreOffice, I stumbled upon JabRef, a very simple interface to BibTex files, with a straight forward concept about formats, and it seems like I found the missing piece of this puzzle
-
JabRef. There’s no perfect piece, and this is no exception. It will only integrate well with LibreOffice Write through a plugin, but I can use that. You can find Linux, and Windows versions. The current version has some bugs too — it will freeze with specific clicks at specific moments, but as soon as you save often enough, it does the job.
Depending on the size of your database, you can keep the core reference database on any other platform, and work on partial BibTex exports, or manage the whole thing in JabRef. Hopefully, the future will probably bring a broader integration scenario, and fix the bugs.
As a regular Linux user, I tend to prefer open, text based formats (such as BibTex), and simple tools specialized in one task, rather than big multipurpose applications. This open-source tool fits neatly in this category, and that’s why it will be my tool of choice for this assignment, and hopefully for the next following years.