Pedscapes

Indian Pediatrics 2002; 39:710

Pedscapes

Citation managers - Also called as personal bibliographic software. These are being increasingly used nowadays for managing references from various journals. With the advent of Internet, access to journal articles has increased dramatically. Doctors read a large number of journals through the Internet every month. If these articles can be classified properly, then retrieval can be easy, especially when required. The citation managers help in this. Moreover, they ensure that the citation is entered in the required format, thus solving a major problem in article writing and thesis writing. This is because they integrate fully with MS Word and other word processing software. Most journals have the "download to citation manager link" in their website.

A large number of citation managers are available for download from the Internet. The only disadvantage being that they do not come free. However, demonstration versions can be downloaded and used. Instituitional subscription can solve the problem of subscription costs. Some of the commonly used citation managers, their URL’s and key features are listed here.

Endnote 3.0.1 - www.endnote.co.uk/ This software enables the searching of remote bibliographical databases on the Internet; the organization of references in a database and the facility to enter references in articles easily.

Reference WebPoster - www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/poster-reference

This software is meant for sharing references through the Internet.

Library Master - www.balboa-software.com This is a reference manager that exists only in DOS version.

Papyrus 7.0 - www.researchsoft-waredesign.com In addition to the usual bibliographic features, documents containing citations can be scanned using Papyrus and the contents stored as citations.

Procite 4 - www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/procite This is a reference manager and helps in generating bibliographies.

Bookends Plus 5 - www.sonny-software.com Bookends is a reference manager exclusively meant for Mac users.

Biblioscape 3.3 - www.biblioscape.com/ This is an extremely user friendly software that allows drag and drop of references to documents.

Reference Manager - www.adept-science.co.uk/products/refman/reference As the name suggests, this has features similar to that mentioned above. According to the developers and the software reviews, this software is the most user-friendly among the reference managers.

C Vidyashankar,

[email protected].