Talk:Reference management software

Proposed merge
A citation creator is different from reference management software (though both functions may be found together). If the articles are merged, it would have to be under a new parent name, but I don't know what that is. Unless someone can find such a name in wide use, the two articles should be separate. Dhaluza 11:05, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I think the generic is Personal bibliographic software, which can cover a lot of ground. As I understand the general  difference  PBS is intended to maintain a personal database and anything that does less, usually just converting things for a single use,  that is a citation creator.DGG 05:01, 18 May 2007 (UTC)


 * The citation creators are mostly web based, so that's hardly personal software, which (to me at least) implies a licensed and installed client side app. Dhaluza 08:50, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Some of the personal bibliographic software is also--there is for example a web based version of endnote which Thomson gives away as a bonus with purchase of WebofScience, but does not sell separately. It interoperates with the client-based version. Other manufacturers are probably going to introduce similar pairings to compete with it. DGG 03:22, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

PBS would not cover bibliographic software which may be used by multiple users either singly or as groups.

As noted above, many bibliographic management systems also provide citation formatting in a range of export formats (HTML, RTF etc.) and export styles (APA, MLA, IEEE etc.).

I do not favour merging the two but my last point above should be pointed out on each page. Sirfragalot 05:56, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
 * good idea.

But PBS can cover groupware, just as PC software like google spreadsheets can be used both ways, just as desktop searching programs can index servers as well as local machines. The technology is merging, the server based programs are developing companion stand alone products, the stand alone products like Endnote are developing server based versions, and people may not always even know where the data and the programs reside. Ask a non-techie where their email is. DGG 04:00, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Reference management in WP
Surely there should be either discussion of or a link to discussion of reference management tools suited for wikimedia. Not sure where to look for this. LeadSongDog 19:21, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
 * We should avoid self references. I'm also not quite sure what you mean by this.  Zotero can scrape COinS found in some WP citation templates; numerous managers can export citation templates.  Citation templates aren't found in all MediaWiki installations, though & there are numerous tools to enable reference management in MediaWiki.  --Karnesky 21:14, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I was thinking the other way around. Large projects with many sub-articles (I was thinking of World War I) have many occasions to refer to the same cited source (or various pages), yet there seems to be no more coherent approach taken than re-enter or copy the whole citation on every article that refers to the source.  It's a substantial waste of resources and effort, not to mention that corrections need to be checked everywhere the source is cited.  A better answer would be to move citations to a bilbliographic database in the commons.  Bots could scrape citations from articles, add them to the database, then either replace or suggest replacement of the citation with a database callout.  Not trivial to implement, but well worth it in the long run.  It should also facilitate interwiki efforst immensely.LeadSongDog 00:12, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks as if refbase is headed towards solving the server-side reference management database part of this. Choice of user preferences for default citation style etc could be built into the WP skins.  Article pages would then just embed a short identifier, like this (except in ref tags).  Of course I have no idea what kind of processing load this would imply, but I'd guess it has to be less than now taken up by the equivalent text-base work. LeadSongDog 23:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I happen to be involved with refbase & it is true that we've worked a bit on MW integration. We were going to just build an extension, but a syntax like 23365 might not be too friendly for the average WP user (as opposed to those who maintain their own wikis & could deal with the grief).  It might also be a bit of work to have it really ready for WikiMedia deployment.  --Karnesky 23:54, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm a bit of a skeptic. Dealing with all the ramifications in WP articles should take us several years. For example, we normally add the availability of non-toll sources when they are available. that is not a present requirement of citation style elsewhere. DGG (talk) 23:43, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Most reference management software can support one or more external URLs and/or can even host PDFs (assuming the copyright restriction permits it). Of course, one could always customize a reference manager to better suit the needs of MediaWiki.  I don't see having availability as being a significant hurdle. --Karnesky 23:54, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Don't crossref and OpenURL already address this? LeadSongDog 06:03, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think this is what DGG had in mind, as these often link to subscription-based (instead of gratis) content. The current WP citation templates don't emit crossref links & this could be one reason why.  refbase does generate OpenURL for use with crossref or a custom resolver & also emits COinS so that the client can choose their own resolver.  Many WP citation templates do use COinS as well.
 * I think DGG is after links to freely accessible content in particular. In either case, it isn't really a hurdle.  Karnesky (talk) 20:38, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I wish it weren't a hurdle, but the publishers and the libraries havent solved it. There are two specialised databases that come close, arXiv and RePEc, but the problem in general is soluble only by manually inserting the references to Open Access versions and keeping them updated. (Those 2 dbs do it by semi-manual addition). DGG (talk) 06:08, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
 * But they can manually be updated in a centrally managed database of references just as they are manually updated in the individual pages right now....--Karnesky (talk) 06:29, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

DOI, JSTOR, PMID, ISBN and other unique (digital) identifiers
Is it worth mentioning that the reference management nowadays involves also mentioning how to find the publication online or in a bookstore/library by providing DOI, PMID, JSTOR, ISBN or some other unique number (instead of author, year, institution, article/book/medium name)? Also, more and more reference management software can scrape all the information needed by providing only this unique identifier. Kazkaskazkasako (talk) 18:45, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: Change subcategory "Retail" to "Proprietary" or something
The two categories "Retail" and and "Web-based" don't represent the complete complement of the category "Open-source." For example, Mendeley is not technically "Retail" since it is Gratis, but it is proprietary. The category "Retail" could be changed to "Proprietary," so that these categories are complementary, and the web-based category could be left as it is, because presumably online systems could be either open-source or proprietary. --Yoderj (talk) 16:02, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Irrelevant sections
In my humble opinion, the relevance of some sections below the lead is dubious. "Reference management software among legal scholars" summarizes just one case study about the use of just three programs by student and scholars on just one law school. "Reference management in Wikipedia" is a bit self-centred and I wonder if the Wikimedia tools for citations can really be classified as a reference management application, as citations can only be 'managed' in the edit screen of individual articles, not in a separate database. The section "Citation creators" is more useful, although it seems that is a different kind, more limited tool than a real reference management application, even if the citations can be stored for later use doesn't this belong in a separate article? Bever (talk) 21:35, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This may change, when wiki-community starts adding all cited articles and journals from Wikipedia to Wikidata (d:Help:Sources). Kazkaskazkasako (talk) 09:54, 19 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I agree. I also think the Project Management section is entirely out of place in this article, and so I deleted it. Bellagio99 (talk) 22:30, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Why in 2 articles: Reference Manager, Comparison of reference managers?
This all deal with one topic and should all be in one WP article. "Reference Manager" is the least comprehensive and surely should be merged into the Comparison article. Wish I were competent to do it. Bellagio99 (talk) 22:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

It is not clear what is this about
What is a reference management software? Is BibTeX part of it? BibTeX is not mentioned in the article. One can build a .bib file with all references in the BibTeX format, one parameter is note, one can write something that can or can not be displayed in the printed bibliography.

The article mention several ways to print bibliographic entries, but that is part of the document generation module. In LaTeX/BibTeX, one put all references in a .bib file, one use some name to identify each entry, one use some consistent naming convention, to include the reference in the text is is sufficient to write \cite{entry-id}, compiling with. one gets a document with the selected cite style, for example see [1] or see Auth99, at the end where the bibliography is printed each reference is printed in the chosen format. The article mention some of them, but that is part of the way in which the document is produced.

To me a reference management software is what is needed to maintain the references file. It should have a way to search the data from other bibliographic data bases, for example I want to cite an algorithm in the first volume of Knuth's Art of computer programming, but I don't remember all the details, like publisher name, year of publication, and the correct title/subtitle. searching Knuth art of programming should bring all the related entries, I can add them all or just the vols 1 and 3. I could add a note to tell what is each about, for example "this volume contains information about the tree balancing algorithm that I used, and more about b-trees, it also has an introduction to coroutines in MIX", I need to know the keywords to search books about data structures, analysis of algorithms, and get the entries with other books about this subject with my comments about what i liked or disliked about it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2806:106E:B:611:8D9C:A504:E992:22F (talk) 03:58, 15 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Per WP:NOTFORUM, talk pages are not for general discussion, but in case it leads to any clarifying edits of this article, I will say this: The BibTeX article says that BibTeX reference management software, and there are GUI applications such as BibDesk that also use the BibTeX file format to store the bibliographic data. Back in the early days of BibTeX, people typically edited their .bib file by hand (emacs text editor has   specifically for this purpose) and then easily searched it with grep or other command-line tools, but now it is likely that most people use a GUI application such as BibDesk or Zotero with the Better BibTeX plug-in or other any app listed in Reference management software. You can find another explanation of reference management software in the following chapter, which I added to the article's list of further reading:  Biogeographist (talk) 19:07, 15 September 2022 (UTC)