Reference Manager Apps

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We all know how overwhelming literature reviews can be. 

Downloading every journal article that even sounds like it might be applicable to your research.  Trying reading through all of them (skimming really), only to feel guilty and anxious about not reading all of them.  Your inner monologue taunting you: “What if that one article I said I didn’t need to read, was the ONE I needed to read and had all the answers?”  Not to mention where do you put all these articles?  How do you keep them organized?  Do you even remember what you already downloaded, or do you have 12 copies of the same journal article?  Also, how do you find the literature you are looking for in the non-sensical file names they are saved under?  I get it.  I have been there.  I didn’t know what to do when I first started my Ph.D.  All my journal articles were saved in a series of OneDrive folders that may or may not have been labeled with the journal title.   After a while, I realized this was unsustainable and inefficient – and I hate things that are inefficient.  So, I hit “The Google” and started asking “Uncle Google” how I could better scour the Internet for journal articles, manage my references, and make my literature reviews more efficient.  This is what I came up with and I share it with you in the hopes that it can help.   

I found that one good way to find journal articles relevant to your research is to set up a Google Scholar alert(s) using keywords.  It will provide a list of search results with hyperlinks to the journal articles and searches various publication websites.  It will deliver these search results to your email at regular intervals.  You can set up multiple Google Scholar alerts based on the keywords you select.  It can get a bit overwhelming so I would caution you to limit your Google Scholar alerts to no more than three.  I got a little crazy with the combinations of my keywords searches and it very quickly became impossible to keep up with all the search results getting dumped into my email.  I am still looking for a decent web scraping script that can automate the process further, but as of now, I haven’t found one.

Now that you have found all these “relevant” journal articles, where to put them?  When I started out, I was downloading them onto my computer or into my cloud.  That quickly became unmanageable.  I had to get my journal articles into a reference manager so I could easily see them, search for them in a usable database format, track which ones I had read, and keep my notes on the literature tied to the applicable article.  Again, Google helped me find online resources, and after asking the advice of a few friends who had recently gotten their PhDs, I bought EndNote.  I don’t recommend doing that and I will tell you why.  There is nothing wrong with the purchased version of EndNote.  It has a lot of bells and whistles.  For example, you can create your own citations styles.  But it was more than what I needed, and it was expensive.  On a Ph.D. student budget, you can get something that is free that will do pretty much what any paid software will do. 

There are many reference managers out there and I tried several reference managers looking for one that gave me what I needed in a user-friendly package.  I settled on Mendeley (which is free).  I like Mendeley because I find it to be the most user-friendly of the reference managers out there and because it is connected to many of the publication services which makes importing citations very easy.  There is also Zotero, RefWorks, and EndNote Basic which are also free.  All these reference managers have a lot of great features that can increase productivity.   Reference managers offer plugins for Microsoft® Word to make inserting citations into your work a lot easier and offer more citation styles than the defaults offered in Word.  Citations can also be exported as .bib or .ris file formats and uploaded into LaTeX compilers for in-text citing.  They offer both online and desktop access to your references which allows for easy import and export of references and the ability to organize your references.  Finally, they also offer web browser extensions to make importing citations easier, even if the full journal article is behind a paywall. 

One note of caution in using the desktop versions of these reference managers versus the online web libraries.  The desktop versions of the reference managers may end up storing your files on your computer which will reduce your storage capacity.  However, there is a limit to the amount of free storage in the reference managers’ online libraries so you may end up having to pay for additional storage at some point or deleting files to free up space.  Another thing I have noticed, sometime during the import process the reference managers don’t quite get all the correct metadata in the correct spots (e.g., classifying the literature correctly).  This is because the reference manager is scanning the literature and if it isn’t a journal article in the publication template and OCR formatted the manager can get confused.  Fixing these issues is super easy in either the online library or desktop application. But something you should be aware of as you download literature from sources like ResearchGate.