But Zotero still doesn't work with a word processor to generate footnotes and bibliography — that's the gravy of reference managers!

And you only have to be rich to afford Endnote. But on Macs, Bookends and Sente are very reasonably priced.

By  Danny Zacharias, at January 18, 2008 1:37 PM  

I have never used it, but RefWorks seems to be comparable to Endnote and is significantly cheaper. You pay to subscribe and the cost is $100/year, which is significantly less than Endnote (over AUD500). It's major disadvantage is that it is an on-line database so if you aren't connected you can't use it, whereas Endnote stores your references on your computer, so you can use it any time. I realise that this is still a lot more than free, but potentially more within the budget of semi-financially challenged people.

Note - that would be RedMAN not RedMOND. :-)

By  Judy Redman, at January 18, 2008 3:11 PM  

Aagh, so sorry, Judy, that's what comes of working from my notiriously collander-like memory. I have corrected it. One of the things I like about Zotero is that though it is a Firefox addin it does not require the web to do its basic work. The database is on your local machine.

As for updating references and notes as you go, I agree Danny that that feature is great - though with Endnote 5+ it seems to come at the price of slowing even a fast machine to a crawl.

Danny, since I am not writing a thesis, and usually work chapter by chapter I think I'll stick to Zotero, and not downgrade to a Mac to get cheap(er) software to slow me down ;)

By  Tim, at January 18, 2008 5:42 PM  

Thanks Tim - I used the Chicago styles to fill in and correct all my citations - it was really easy just to do it with MS Word and copy and paste. One day I will fix my bibliography (well maybe).

Would my presentation on the Psalms be worth submitting for this Biblical Writing month? (see http://bmd.gx.ca/psalms/psalms.pdf )

Congratulations on your reading!

By  Bob MacDonald, at January 18, 2008 7:08 PM  

That's OK, Tim - many people do it.

My university provides Endnote for free to graduate students, which makes it my software of choice. I am currently using Endnote X and before that used 9 and neither of these slowed my computer that I noticed. My current computer is high-end Vista compatible and I'm using XP so I wouldn't expect it to have any trouble, but my old computer which was much less powerful didn't seem to mind it either. Mind you, I always order double the amount of RAM that comes standard with any computer package - more if I can afford it, and perhaps Endnote is RAM hungry.

By  Judy Redman, at January 18, 2008 9:36 PM  

Judy:
Maybe Endnote has improved since version 6 ;) but anyway I'm no longer eligible for a University copy and Carey is too small to get a good price. Thankfully for chapter length projects Zotero works brilliantly.

Bob:
Definitely, make a post, name it and claim it ;)

By  Tim, at January 19, 2008 3:18 PM  

The most important features for me are social bookmarking, a rich set of capabilities for extracting bibliographic data from web sites, and export so my data doesn't get trapped. To that end, i recently switched from Connotea to CiteULike: the former seems to have a larger user base (hence is stronger on social bookmarking), but CiteULike is better on extracting data, and i find that's crucial to actually using it. CiteULike can also generate bibliography references in a variety of styles (but like Zotero it doesn't work directly with a word processor).

By  Sean, at January 22, 2008 8:08 AM  

There may be some misunderstanding above, for the record:

Zotero integrates well with MS Word or Open Office on PCs, Macs and Linux. Within office one can insert references, which are updated when the information in Zotero is changed, with a one click "refresh" command. The system also generates bibliographies. It covers most common referencing schemes. It is good at extracting data from catalogues etc. and usually the Endnote link works automatically to dump the data in Zotero, even when the page is not a simple one click on the address bar reference.

By  Tim, at January 22, 2008 3:28 PM  

"Danny, since I am not writing a thesis, and usually work chapter by chapter I think I'll stick to Zotero, and not downgrade to a Mac to get cheap(er) software to slow me down ;)"


Oh Tim, you are still stuck in the shadow world of PC. Time to get a real computer :-)

By  Danny Zacharias, at January 23, 2008 8:38 AM  

Well, a real computer would be nice, but so far I have not had time to install and learn Linux, but it is looking increasingly attractive. As Windows and MacOS both suffer feature bloat ;) maybe I'll make running Linux a hobby project till I learn enough to swap OOes

By  Tim, at January 23, 2008 9:14 AM  

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