
Weeks later, on the advice of a university librarian, she was using Zotero to insert citations in an online magazine when she was moved to tweet: “HOW AM I JUST USING A CITATION MANAGER FOR THE FIRST TIME?” Reference features So she turned to an online bibliography generator, and “used as few citations as possible to save myself some pain”, she says. But for her exam, she needed a format that Google Scholar didn’t support, and she had no time to learn to use a new piece of software that did. She had been using Google Scholar, which can output references in only a small number of styles. When Wissel took the preliminary examinations required by her department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, to advance in her doctoral programme, she struggled with the citations. For PhD student Emily Wissel, who studies how the microbiome affects pregnancy, it was Zotero’s status as a freely available, open-source project that led her to favour it over other software. (ReadCube Papers is supported by Digital Science - part of Holtzbrinck, the majority shareholder in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature.)įor Goldacre, Paperpile’s seamless compatibility with Google Docs, which the team uses for collaborative writing, is what tipped the scales towards its use. There are dozens of options, including EndNote, Mendeley Reference Manager, ReadCube Papers, RefWorks, Sciwheel and Zotero. Reference-management tools, also called citation managers, perform a handful of related functions: searching the literature storing and organizing PDFs of papers and supplementary materials generating bibliographies and fostering collaboration.

That’s because it dovetails nicely with his team’s workflow. Goldacre, who is also director of the DataLab at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, UK, explains: “Paperpile is the first time I’ve used a reference manager where it didn’t make me want to punch myself in the face on a regular basis out of sheer rage. Physician Ben Goldacre, for instance, has tweeted at least five times about Paperpile, a subscription-based reference manager that integrates tightly with Google Docs, calling it “amazing”, “fantastic, best ever”, and “unbeLIEVably good”. For such utilitarian tools, reference management software can inspire strong reactions.
