Reference Manager 11

March 28th, 2004 Stewart Posted in Uncategorized |

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.)