Tuesday 5 October 2010

World of reference managers


We are preparing the next phase of project research work, which is investigating what reference managers are used here in Cambridge, and the attitudes of researchers and academics to various reference manager features or potential future features. 

Part of this research will be a survey, and we've been thinking about questions over the last couple of weeks. There's a lot of things we want to find out about, whilst keeping the questionnaire short enough that academics are happy to complete it.

One obvious question is: what reference managers do you use? And we'e got a list of ones we know about to put in as options. If you know of any more, please let us know in the comments...
  • Papers
  • EndNote
  • Mendeley
  • Zotero
  • qiqqa
  • iCite
  • JabRef
  • RefWorks 
  • Paperpile
  • BibTeX
  • Own computer-based system, such as an Excel spreadsheet
  • Own paper system
  • Other (please specify)
As well as finding out which of these (and it might well be more than one!) people use, we have questions in other categories too - at least, in our draft questionnaire - we might need to slim it down. Again, if there are other things you think we should ask the good scholars of Cambridge, please post in the comments!
  1. About you - career stage, subject area, level of collaboration in your research
  2. Level of usage of "web2" tools and other technology
  3. Level of comfort and practice sharing aspects of research
  4. What reference managers you use
  5. What you use reference managers for (eg. formatting citations, storing papers to read later, finding out what others are reading)
  6. Whether you use any of the "social" aspects of reference managers, such as sharing papers with a group
  7. How you choose reference managers (feature lists, price, provision by institution, use by peers, training or support availability, long term sustainability of the tool, etc)

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