Reference Manager 11

March 28th, 2004 Stewart

A new version of Reference Manager was just released and I am eagerly anticipating the arrival of my copy in the mail. While I have been an EndNote user, and most likely will continue to be for the forseeable future, Ref Man 11 does have some intriguing new features. The one-button “publish to Web” feature, in particular, looks valuable and useful.

That said, the more I work with Reference Manager in preparing for my workshops, the more I like EndNote. Reference Manager seems to have been built with function in mind over form — It’s capabilities are impressive, but the user interface leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, the “Insert Object” features in EndNote have not yet been duplicated in Reference Manager — Linking to files is possible, but Ref Man cannot help you organize them.

I like EndNote’s clean, intuitive interface and smart features, and I think I’m with the majority on this one. According to the ISI reps I’ve spoken with, EndNote controls about 70 percent of their entire bibliographic software user base. (BTW - A warning to ProCite users: Apparently ISI is considering dropping the product, since ProCite is such a small percentage of their overall user base.)

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RefViz "real world" applications

March 12th, 2004 Stewart

Something that strikes me about RefViz is that it is only useful for sorting particularly large databases of references. An “average” EndNote Library of, say, 250 records, can be searched and sorted pretty effectively by EndNote — No extraneous software is really needed.

However, for users with particularly large or complex databases, this little program might be quite useful. If you were conducting a systematic review, for example, and had searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Clinical Trials Registry, etc., you would likely have a very large database of records, only a handful of which would actually meet the criteria for your review. Previously, this record set would have to be culled by hand, a painstaking and labor-intensive process that can take hours or days to complete.

However, if you used RefViz for this activity, all references would be grouped by elements such as “clinical” or “trial” which could make this process much quicker. I’m beginning to look at how this might be done, specifically, and will report back on this soon.

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RefViz

March 11th, 2004 Stewart

I recently received a training copy of RefViz, and I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it. For researchers working on review articles, book chapters, or evidence-based research, I think this will prove to be a valuable tool.

RefViz takes any database of references (like an EndNote Library or Reference Manager database) and culls through it, indexing and organizing the information by examining the title, keywords and abstracts. What you end up with is a “map” of sorts, a visual representation of these articles as if you had taken the time to sort them into stacks on the floor.

Data mining tools such as this are commonplace enough in bioinformatics, but somewhat new to the world of bibliographic information. I’ll post more about RefViz in the coming days.

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