Reference Management for Free?

Before playing with the reference management software myself I had a look round to see how some other CPD23-ers were using it.

An excellent post by Deanne Boyer  at http://curbservice.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/using-online-collaboration-for-cross-team-work-google-docs-zotero/ talks about a way her library service has actually made use of some collaborative tools to share and organise the results of literature searches.

Archel at http://archelina23things.blogspot.com/2011/08/thing-14-zoteromendeleyciteulike.html in another really thoughtful post raises some questions about copyright which had also occured to me and has them answered by a developer from Mendeley - how cool is that!

I then had a look at Zotero and CiteULike.  I was really impressed with the way Zotero integrates with bibliographic searches and Word. It  automatically offered to save my HDAS downloads if I selected RIS format for them. (In fact I haven't found a way to disable this, although it should be possible) I was able to save websites using the little page icon which appears at the right of the address bar. Sadly I'm not going to be able to use Zotero at work because of the NHS insistence on IE or nothing, but it would be a fantastically useful tool for complicated literature searches such as systematic reviews.

CiteULike is a web interface rather than integrating with a browser so should be easier to use in a restricted IT environment. From the MyCiteULike page you can add items by DOI, ISBN or Pubmed no. and CiteULike works out the proper citation. You can import RIS files downloaded from databases. You can also add a button to your toolbar to instantly add citations. I think I might try this at work - it would be a real bonus to find something that actually functions in the NHS. With CiteULike you don't get the word-processor integration and referencing feature which is so important to those writing assignments or publications, but you can export to a RIS file or to a text file.

I was really impressed with the functionality you get with these freepeices of software. I can see them being really useful for me personally if I ever go back to study and to my users.