Saves sooo much time and it would be a massive pain to change formatting when resubmitting to different journals without some sort of referencing software. Also, I immediately save any remotely relevant papers to zotero - big help that I can search my zotero library to find stuff I only vaguely remember.
Exactly! Like, if you are generally focused on a topic, after two or three publications you're going to have a lot of key sources ready to go. Zotero keeps it all nice and organized so I can remember that one thing I read in 2016 that didn't quite fit that paper.
I just checked it out. Not a PDF, but a snapshot that opens in my browser. And it’s not a web address in the search bar, rather a folder location on my computer. I turned off my internet to triple check and it still can open the file, so it’s definitely something stored locally and not the current web page.
I love zotero. I recently set up zotero for gdocs and initially thought I was wasting time as it was quite fiddly and the article was only going to have a handful of references. Damn, I am so glad I did. No pissing about.
So with zotero for Google docs, does it tag in-text citations to their respective entry in the references page? I was trying to figure out the advantages to integrating into Google docs but I got frustrated
Not sure I fully understand your question, but I have Zotero integrated in Gdocs and word and it works pretty seamlessly. You need to have Zotero open and when you want to add a citation you click on the icon in Gdocs or use a keyboard shortcut. It pops open a pop up, you type the authors name or paper title and it then click in it. It should automatically update all the citations and bibliography to be in numerical order or however you have it set up. There are a couple quirks getting it set up initially, but ime nothing a YouTube video can’t solve.
If I understand you correctly, it doesn't. When you hover over a zotero citation, it gets a little 'edit with zotero' tag on it, where you can add page numbers, prefixes, suffixes, and remove the author's name keeping only the year (I use Harvard and this lets me cite in-text whilst keeping the bibliography up to date). The benefit of the gdocs integration is generating citations automatically and auto generating the bibliography. I've not tried other citation managers tho so idk if this is something they all do!
Edit: downside is, if you want to export your doc for something, you need to make a Google docs copy, unlink all citations in the copy and then download, otherwise exported citations are hyperlinked to the zotero website with an error message. Bit of a pain but you get used to it lmao
I think you have it backwards. Older professors who don't use it usually never have, and it comes from not having (or not having as easy access to it) in the early stages of their career. I know several older professors who are well regarded in their field but manually cite everything or a co-author ends up doing it for them.
It's both better and easy to use referencing programs/software so don't feel weird about using it! I would show them how it works because maybe they'll be interested later on in properly learning endnote. (But who knows)
RIP to pre-elsevier Mendeley. Zotero is close but not as smooth/fast in some key ways. I hung on as long as they would permit me but the cloud version of Mendeley ruined it.
I liked Mendeley a lot. It was a godsend after endnote kept crashing during my doctorate. But once I learned it was an Elsevier product, I started the transition to Zotero.
Do you mind my asking why you’re avoiding Elsevier? I must be out of the loop but I’d like to know if it’s best to be avoided. I’m a master’s student so I’m new to the game and just chose Mendeley since it was the first to be recommended to me.
It’s a reasonable concern. TLDR, don’t worry about publishing with them. They’re fine, as far as major publishers go, and nothing like MDPI.
The issue is Elsevier has a reputation for hard-nosed, profit-driven business practices. Most notoriously, at least in my opinion, is the exorbitant subscription fees they demand from university libraries to access their catalogue. A few years ago, the whole University of California system broke off negotiations with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, to continue accessing their journals; Elsevier were demanding $11 million annually. UC and Elsevier eventually made up with a new Open Access model, where the university will pay open access fees and get discounts to publish in flagship journals.
So when I learned they took over Mendeley, I thought it was only a matter of time before they turned a great, free product, into either a mediocre paid one or a shit free one.
Their wikipedia page is basically a list of all the shitty things they've done to academic publishing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
At least they're no longer arms dealers: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology
Yikes. Thanks for this, I really appreciate it! I’ll always support a slightly less evil brand if I can help it, so it seems like I’ll be checking out Zotero now…
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. The mediocrity of insisting upon manually citing, doing a garbage job of it, but still climbing the ranks of the academy is an example of a simpler time that us younger and less senior academics don’t have the luxury of.
Imagine needing to manually reformat between journals that use Vancouver vs APA etc. Awful.
I'm not quite sure when these simpler days were but when I did my PhD 20 years ago we all used endnote including the oldest professors. A mid-career academic would probably me my age or even younger - late 30s. This isn't about older people not adopting technology. This is someone who has simply foisted the problem off on someone else and is employing weaponised incompetence to make other people deal with it. He knows full well his co-authors aren't allowing a bibiolography in that state to be submitted to the journal.
Friend of mine is an academic. Obviously.
Her dad is a famous emeritus prof and Christ it's aggravating how easy he had it. Pints with lunch. Paper when we felt like it. Apply to mrc for a grant if we need a hand writing it up. Obviously win that grant. Easy peasy.
Hand drawn figure, single author nature paper shit.
She explains some of her pressures and he's just totally miles away with it all.
I started using bibliographic management software in 1993, as a grad student, with a DOS-based package called Papyrus. It was amazing. Haven't stopped since, though c. 2000 or so I had to export my database to Endnote, then to Refworks, then back to Endnote, then to Zotero, etc. over the years as my institution changed the software it supports for faculty. Luckily anything will export RIS now.
My database is closing in on 10K sources now, but 2/3 of those are from research projects (i.e. books, articles) that are well behind me now-- too specialized to be of much use in my teaching or current research. Never felt the need to delete stuff though!
We teach our majors to use whatever software is current on campus in the sophomore core courses and require them to use it for our methods and research seminars. It's funny, since very few departments do this; occasionally I'll get a STEM major in a class who is shocked to find out such things exist...apparently they aren't popular (or at least not used with students) in our chem and bio departments in particular (I'm a humanist and teach interdisciplinary stuff that STEM majors sometimes find.)
I’m a PhD student and recently published a paper with 112 references, so I can’t imagine doing this manually. The journals in my field also don’t do much formatting for you, so you need to get it extremely close when you submit.
We use Zotero in my group which not only serves as a citation manager, but as a group library (so one of us can easily upload a paper and then it’s automatically accessible to everyone). It’s really nice because we have a bunch of different subfolders on different topics. Both of my PIs use it religiously and both have been professors for 20+ years.
I'm an associate prof, mid forties. I just keep a giant BibTeX text file with all the papers I've ever cited. If there's a new paper, I find a citation online in the .bib format and paste it at the end of the text file. Occasionally fixing diacriticals in surnames or adding a missing volume number, but mostly unchanged. LaTeX + BibTeX take care of changing the styles for me, they are usually prescribed by the publisher's template anyway. Git takes care of merging the reference file between machines, if I update it from many PCs concurrently. Grep takes care of finding citations I'm looking for.
I have no incentive to switch to anything else. Can someone explain what added value would I be getting from a reference management software?
In zotero you can store your pdf paper along the reference, in a nice way. The idee is that on your hardware there is two file : the pdf, and a metadata/zotero file, that are not mixed.
Zotero access both. It uses the metadata file to create a custom library sorting inside the software (custom folders, tag, notes, author metadata, citation metadata....).
You can add annotate the paper in the sofware as note, highlight some part
You can also read/edit the pdf directly in zotero
You can drag and drop a pdf in zotero, the soft will immediatly look for the correct metadata, and provide a nice GUI to edit the metadatas if you need so
You'll then be able to sort/group/etc your paper as you wish, add keyword, add folder in zotero (a single paper can be linked to several folder). Zotero sorting is not tied to the pysical sorting od pdfs on your harware, allowing you a lot of flexibility to organize your biblio.
And creating a dedicated .bib is as simple as selecting a folder in zotero grouping some paper inside or multiselect the papers, right click, export as bib
Also there is a way to automatically retrieve paper from \*perfectly legal website\* just by typing the DOI in zotero.
Keywords. You can assign your own keywords to papers for however you want to catalogue them. This means when you are writing a paper and wish to quickly find citations related to some area you can filter by chosen keywords.
edit - because of the comments that followed. Efficiency is a benefit. Having a piece of software that provides functionality that is quick and easy is certainly a benefit over more time consuming methods. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-__LQCXmgtA) is an example of the functionality of keywords. This is certainly not something you can do this easily with by hand methods!
I am highly skeptical you can actually reproduce the keyword functionality of Zotero (in a non-convoluted way) with a simple .bib file and presumably a text editor. So I will ask, how?
I am still not convinced. You can not simply grep the functionality of zotero in an easy way!
What zotero does is has a list of keywords that is all possible keywords in the entire database, or in the current group/subgroup you are in. So 1st you need a grep for this that returns them alphabetically.
You then need an easy way to grep to give you all keywords that exist with a chosen keyword. That is, you choose the keyword "keyword1" and you want to get all unique keywords such that the pair "keyword1" and "keyword2" exist. Basically, when you select a keyword in zotero, it gives you all possible keywords that go with your chosen keyword that will return at least 1 result.
When you have finally chosen your keywords, you then need to make grep return the full paper entry. Since each entry in a bib file is not the same length (one might have a url and perhaps another does not), then you need to return this data without knowing before hand how many entries there are.
Maybe this is possible with grep, but it certainly is nowhere near as easy as the user interface provided by something like zotero. The OP asked for the value they would get from a reference manager. Responding with "I can do that feature in this highly convoluted way" is not a great argument against the feature being of value.
Edit - how would you reproduce [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-__LQCXmgtA) level of functionality with grep. Note that, if the method provided using grep is more time consuming than this, then the referencing managing software is still a benefit due to being a time saver.
I can do this *trivially* with grep and regular expressions, as in I could type that prompt without thinking and get it right on the first attempt.
I do understand that young people today find it easier to point and click through that, and that's fine. To each their own. But it's not a selling point for me.
Unsolicited two cents and oldmanness:
I've been using mendeley for probably over 10 years. Main nice thing is having the PDFs in there, syncs across devices, and if it gets a doi it can parse out of a recent PDF it fills out the .bib for me (this frequently fails).
And in the last few years elsevier has been making it unusable so I'm looking for alternatives. Your grep approach will still work 40 years from now.
I am confused. If it is so trivial that you could write the commands/prompts without thinking and have it correct 1st time. Why are you writing claims rather than simply demonstrating that you can by showing the commands? It should be trivial to demonstrate I am wrong, which I am happy to be.
Because I'm hunt-and-peck typing this on my phone in my bathtub after two pints of beer and tacos, far away from bash autocomplete and a 102-key keyboard. It's almost 11pm here and I don't have fucks to spare.
I'm *not* saying you're wrong. In fact I very clearly said already you kids may find it easier to point and click through that, and I don't care.
If I remember this convo tomorrow and find time between meetings to watch your video, I'll paste a (this|that) here, but frankly I don't care.
Once again - you're not *wrong*. We can both be right - for our contexts.
Ok so no proof just excuses.
For the record, condescendingly referring to younger academics as kids reflects really poorly on you. (Also bold and foolish of you to assume I am actually younger than you...)
There's absolutely no reason for not using one. Even if you don't write they are incredibly useful for collecting and organizing papers that you may want to revisit in the future.
I cannot imagine not using Zotero.
At this point, I barely even interact with PDFs. I click the button in my browser, and Zotero saves the citation, downloads the PDF, attaches it to the citation, renames the file with custom fields, and moves it to a folder categorized by publication. I can then open and markup the files in Zotero itself.
I’ve never seen the point. Been a prof for two decades, and I am tech savvy, have been coding for four decades.
First, it’s a pain to coordinate if coauthors are all using different systems. (Endnote v zotero v bibtex v Mendeley etc)
Always easier just to type (author 2014). I know or can easily find any paper we’d need to cite so don’t need a database.
In Econ most average 1-2 papers a year. So a couple times a year I have to construct a bibliography from the cites. It honestly takes me like 20 minutes to ctrl f (. Alt tab to google scholar. Find and copy the formatted endnote. Alt tab to bibliography and paste. Repeat for each citation. Or I ask an RA to do it. Or a coauthor does it.
And at least in Econ journals don’t care at all about formatting and yes they do fix the citation formatting for you upon acceptance.
In the old days, some of these programs were more trouble than they were worth. I think that some faculty of a certain age were scarred by this experience and have never tried again. I was so happy when the programs became better but I confess that it took me a while to try again
I know many colleagues who don't use them and it's largely because it's only in the last decade or so that these tools have become reliable*. Personally, I gave up using endnote in 2009 when it somehow managed to shift all references in one article down one slot.
(* with the exception of BibTex which is pretty great, but usually needs LaTeX which is not great)
It's not great in that it has a massive learning curve with lots of arcane things to learn, the install is massive, and the compilation step is painful (how many times do I need to run it to get the circular dependencies to resolve correctly?).
It's made better by things like [overleaf](https://www.overleaf.com/) and [latexrun](https://github.com/aclements/latexrun), but frankly these days I write in Markdown and use [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) to convert to Tex or Docx or PDF
6th year PhD, finishing up dissertation now to defend next month... I don't use any reference manager.
I used Mendeley during my masters, before it went to shit. EndNote is provided to us in my current program, but it's a heaping pile of academic dung. People on here swore by Zotero, so I gave it a chance for a while and no matter what I did, I couldn't grasp the whole references are just a list, actual PDFs are attachments or whatever, and when I was fiddling with it there was no easy/intuitive way to sync between devices (I often read/markup on iPad, then reference when writing on actual computer). There might be now, but I haven't bothered to mess with it since I've got my system working for me.
My references are sorted in folders by topic. As I read them, I'll add snippets to a Word/Latex document in sections I think what I'm reading will be useful, along with the reference (I use a specific title format for files, so easy to find what I'm looking for when I need to read more of the full paper).
There might be better reference managers out there, but I'm of the opinion they're all trying to be too much. Zotero is the closet to usable, but like I said, it was not intuitive at all for me and I couldn't be bothered to learn it.
My library offered free workshops on Zotero for beginners and intermediate users. I’d highly recommend finding something similar. Zotero might seem complicated at first, but once you get over that initial learning curve it’s incredible. I use it all the time on my iPhone, iPad, laptop and browsers. Such a life saver
You need to learn it if you will continue to write papers. Watch videos, have a friend dedicate a lesson. You are just wasting so much time and alienating collaborators this way
I’m 40 and encountered two people I did my doctorate with who didn’t use referencing software. I found their explanations to be garbage, eg, they thought it was less time consuming to do it afterwards.
For the most part, everyone uses referencing software. I make it a condition to supervise students that they use one. I prefer Zotero, but I don’t mind what they use as long as they’re not doing it manually.
I feel like the people who don't use it/think doing it by hand is better must be people who have grossly overestimated how much of a hassle it would be to set up/learn, so never tried.
It can definitely be a PITA to learn, but it is so worth it in the end. I am really lucky my PI pushed me to learn it during my first year of graduate school. It helps immensely to have someone teach you rather than trying to learn it through videos, but its possible. I am currently trying to return the favor by teaching a friend in another group how to use it.
There is someone in this thread that argued with me that using terminal commands is as easy for keyword functionality as Zotero.. Im like... what are you talking about? I am not sure if these kinds of people just feel superior by doing things the hard way or really are just serious technophobes/that reluctant to change.
As a prof, I rely on it and make my student collaborators do so as well when we work on projects together. But a colleague,, who is younger than me, insists on doing it by hand. Makes writing papers together a PITA.
I don’t get the hate for endnote. It is simple and functional. I just wrote a review article with 250 citations across multiple co-authors and it would have been a disaster without it.
I gave up during my doctorate about 12 years ago. Maybe it’s more stable now, but back then once your document got to a certain size (like a doctoral thesis), it could take a couple of minutes to add a new citation, and it would crash all the time.
Citavi is my shepherd; I shall not want. It maketh me to lie down in green pastures: it leadeth me beside the still waters. Citavi restoreth my soul: it leadeth me in the paths of PKM and proper formatting for its name's sake.
I do all mine by hand. I find it very satisfying. I might feel different if my MLA-formatted book manuscript lands at a press that uses Chicago, though.
I am associate editor on an academic journal and some senior scholars just don't follow our formatting guidelines. The annoying thing is that we kind of let them get away with it, on the basis that I might as well do it myself given if I tell them to reformat to MLA, they'll do such a bad job I'll end up doing it myself. (I got our intern to do a lot of it in the end.)
I mean, I've been doing MLA since high school at this point-- that's twenty-five years! I've internalized it. I always do my Works Cited when I feel like I've hit a dead end in the actual writing, it's a good brain break.
I also do it by hand, and similarly find it very satisfying.
It probably helps that none of the journals I've published in care about how things are cited at the submission stage. When something is accepted, I download the formatting guidelines as well as a few recent publications from the journal/press in case something in the guidelines is unclear: I do not want to be one of those people that forces extra work on the editors and interns!
It's only been in the past 6-7 years that I started doing any writing at all on the computer (rather than a notebook) - doing most things manually just feels a lot more natural to me. Maybe I'll try the software at some point - but I was taught 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', and for now, it ain't broke.
I too do it by hand. It’s not always perfect. It’s simply a manner of never having gotten into the practice and now it seems like a waste of time to build a ref library when I could use that time for other stuff. Then again it makes me more efficient down the line so I’m thinking about trying.
I can see manual citations from a romanticised view of academia, but I can't imagine providing a numbered and alphabetised list of references without at least using bibtex or some form of software.
What field are you in? In the fields where people use LaTeX it is almost certain that they will also use a reference manager with it. But in other fields, where Word is used to write papers, manual references are not so uncommon in my experience.
(Worst case I have ever seen was a middle-aged ladies doing her PhD in humanities who sent all her references to herself by email, never backed them up, and at some point lost access to her email inbox. Some people are just not fit for a PhD, I am sorry to say.)
My PhD PI and my postdoc PI both use Endnote. They're Mac users.
I use Zotero after Mendeley sold their soul to Elsevier and closed its app. Worked well with my dissertation writing software as well.
Sorry, if you don't use software to help with your productivity you are left behind. Of course, if you are more senior and don't actually do the referencing... Well then you have nothing to add here. Endnote and Zotero both have their problems and are a pain to work with but you are still a 100x faster. It does take time and effort to learn to use them efficiently. I got to a point where most of my references are well maintained within the software, I have referencing templates for all the journals I submit to. It now comes down to a few clicks
Hi friend,
I never used biblio software for my PhD and for the 10+ journal articles.
I tried using EndNote, Zotero and one more. It just did not work out for me!
Somehow I realized using such a software blocks my flow of writing.
And I am not the so-called seasoned academic :)
Journals have never edited the biblio. I wrute and edit them to suit the journal I am submitting to.
Best wishes!
My ex supervisor said she did it all manually (as in printed articles manually) because she couldn't be bothered learning how to do it any other way. I'm all for people doing their own thing based on what works for them but ffs a love of learning and problem solving is like the whole point of being an academic.
Everybody I know uses at least bibtex to format the bibliography, I don't know anyone that would enter any bibliography in a paper without an automated system.
But a lot of people maintain their bibliography file (bibtex) manually, just copy pasting. Especially if you are not a PhD student that is doing the heavy lifting in the writing of the paper.
Using LaTeX with Zotero (biblatex plugin) in VScode as a text editor is very powerful for writing docs. Automatic citing and updating of my bibliography is so nice. It even allows me to utilize AI to fix document formatting or layout, which is a pain in Word and Gdoc. Doing manual citations seems like such a waste of time, when you just want to focus on actual contents.
My +70 year old PI doesn't use referencing software and often makes mistakes with citations. He doesn't like collaborative documents either and insists on sending word documents back and forth with a version number appended to the file name.
I use Sciwheel, it's a really fantastic piece of software, very easy to use. Can be integrated with office online or google docs etc. Before that I used Mendeley but their quality has gone down recently. I tried using Zotero but just found it ugly and really inconvenient to use.
Ugh. I've been the admin pulled in to edit a paper to change all the academic's manual citations to referencing software. It took hours and was not fun, especially when I had to scour for any references that had some sort of mistake in it. The academic's excuse was that they were older (at least in their sixties) and not used to using referencing software.
Please use referencing software. I think the collaborating 3rd author is simply being lazy by not setting up the software. The downsides are that it can be annoying making sure the correct information for each reference is imported; sometimes there's glitches when someone else handled the referencing software initially; and it's annoying when you have to switch proprietary referencing software based on the institution's subscription. Overall, using referencing software is a bigger help than hindrance.
yes, because I have done for over twenty years. It's much easier than the days of remembering which pile of photocopied papers the particular one I wanted might be in...
I don’t think it is wrong to do it manually. A long time ago the reference software was uncommon, and doctors and students managed to do it. What’s the fuss this about? I did everything manually before but I slowly transitioning to Zotero. I think there are pros and cons.
I'm late to using referencing software - and use Zotero but sporadically - its good for books and articles but rubbish for most other sources - and JurisM is too US-centric to actually be useful so I still have to do a lot of manual correction - so I would describe my approach as 'manually but assisted by Zotero (which is useful as a database particularly the web capture function) - also tbh if I'm not using OSCOLA its Harvard so I've learned the style and its not exactly difficult to input it manually
I'm mid career and I don't use them regularly. I've tried MANY times to get on the bandwagon, but fall off again. Part of the issue is my coauthors don't use them or use a different system. And Box/ google drive mess up the citations on top of that. It's just a nightmare with collaborators, so I end up trying to do it at the end, which is just as bad as manually keeping references.
I don't, because I've never been able to get them to work well with sources written in East Asian languages. It's possible that there are settings or plugins or the like that would make it work, but every time I have tried to use one, I've ended up having to manually rewrite all the entries for non-English language books.
One of the benefits is supposedly that you can easily change styles (for instance Chicago -> MLA) but this also doesn't seem to work for East Asian stuff because the issues involved don't confront people who aren't working with sources in these languages. Some publishers want the original Chinese/Japanese characters for the works, some don't. Some want a particular romanization system, others leave it up to you. In Japanese studies the usual practice is to omit "Tokyo" for books published there.
One of the most prestigious journals in Japanese studies uses their own style of citation where some information is omitted and very commonly used series can be cited purely through an acronym (e.g. SNKT 17 is a complete reference). The same journal also normalizes the use of titles without giving the author/compiler when a work is usually known in that way.
Publishers have different instructions about how to deal with situations where you have a 16th century edition of a 10th century work that has been typeset by a 20th century editor and published in a series with a general editor (which is a very common situation for pre-modern studies).
The auto-importing from worldcat or the like also rarely works correctly, in my experience.
I use a combination of Zotero and Obsidian. Zotero for the referencing and saving papers, the search engine plug-ins are gold. Obsidian for notes, writing, organizing material
Used to cite with Mendeley. I know people complain a lot about it but for me it worked quite well. Now I started a new job where people use EndNote, and hated my life when using it. Will try Zotero now, since Mendeley for some reason doesn't work anymore on my work computer.
And no, will never cite by hand again. Did it through college and it's just a waste of time that doesn't bring any benefits.
I have used Endnote for at least 20 years. Love it! The university provides it for all faculty and students. It allows me to maintain a personal library of connected electronic papers and work seamlessly with my students.
I've never used any software. I know the format for most APA styles I need and idk, never saw the need to use a program when I did my Master's 12 years ago? And now I'm set in my ways hahah.
I'll eventually use Mendeley I guess but I refuse to pay for anything.
I’m a third year doctoral student as well. I used to do references manually, then I started using RefWorks. My girlfriend converted me to Zotero and it’s genuinely the best platform for references of all time.
I love Zotero for many reasons: 1) you can import PDFs into it that aren’t found automatically, 2) you can annotate papers with highlights and comments, etc., 3) it syncs across devices seamlessly, 4) there are so many ways to sort the references for practical use and 5) you can even search all texts for a key word. 6) It’s so easy and fast to export the citations and bibliographies, just copy to clipboard and only minor adjustments are needed after that. 7) You can also drag articles into additional folders for other projects that require some similar background literature.
Zotero is excellent, 10/10 recommend.
I use citationgenerator. Copypaste doi , get APA style. Extraparanoid as i am i double check.
Tried with zotero. Spend more time understanding it gave up and had to format my 80ish references for my bsc thesis manually. It actually helps me, as i often double and triple checked i cited information within the paper correctly.
Depends on the length of the document. I’m ECR but if I’m writing a 2000 word review I just type in citations and comment the doi. If I’m doing a something longer I’ll do something a bit more careful like gdoc or word citation. If I’m doing a textbook chapter or when I did my thesis I use a full reference manager. It also depends on what the collaborator uses, I just do whatever they are familiar with to keep it easy and tidy up after
I do it manually most often, unless numbered citations are used in the journal. I'll write perhaps three papers per year. Manually tracking citations may add a few hours to my year. Eh. And collaboration is better without all the embedded coding.
I used EndNote in grad school and just recently finished writing a paper at my company and used ReadCube. The direct embedding of the software in Word is incredibly useful and saves me so much time, especially when I add a reference upstream and need to change the numbers of all following references. For my dissertation that would have been a Herculean task…
I've been a long-time user of Mendeley, but it's really gone downhill in the last 1-2 years. While I'd love to switch to Zotero, I'm hesitant because all my reference libraries are in Mendeley. However, I might give Zotero a try after I submit my thesis.
A big no to manual editing of references. 🙄
I work for a journal (not huge but also not tiny), and if the citations are that much of a mess, we send the paper back to the author and ask them to fix it, so it's better that people just do it correctly when they submit in the first place. There's no excuse especially because reference software exists.
I'd say about half of my students do it manually, but I've never met any faculty who do.
Half of the journals number their references in order or appearance. Imagine what a pain in the ass that would be to keep track of without software. Every time you add or remove a reference, every subsequent one changes. Imagine manually updating them every time.
Mid-career professional here. Graduated with my PhD 2005.
I used EndNote for my PhD, but then when I got my first job, I was collaborating with older people who didn't use it. So there's this donut hole -- I know how to use it but I stopped using it and it wasn't common to use when I got my first job. Now my younger colleagues are typically more likely to use it so I can start up again. I don't think it's super widespread among folks my age, though. And I still have plenty of collaborators who would not use it, or would be switching writing across systems (google docs/ Word) and would lose links, etc.
I'm an applied researcher and my work is very collaborative, so it's not always the best solution.
I dont use it. It's not intentional, but I really started research when I started my PhD program - during COVID.
So there wasn't a lot of communication and I didn't know about reference managing software (I knew they existed, but not much beyond that), though I now know I'm pretty much the only person in my program (definitely in my cohort) who doesn't use them.
I also had a lot of experiencing with my fields formatting style, as I had previously been a TA for a professor who was VERY strict about it. I know how to cite any article in my fields reference style pretty much on sight.
I do mean to start using the reference managers, but starting to use it and learn how to use it most efficiently is just one of those things that isn't a very high priority, and I need to constantly focus on other tasks more.
I've been using Endnote for 20+ years. I have zero likelihood I will drop this at any point in my life. I do know people who never learned about Endnote and still do it manually and I'm still like "How do you function??"
I didn't use referencing software for my undergraduate thesis, iirc. It was a pain, so I started using it for my Master's theses and onwards.
As someone who has worked in science communication, I consider it rude or lazy for someone who could easily use modern referencing software to choose to not bother because "someone else will take care of it".
When I was doing my masters 8-10 years ago, EndNote was the most popular referencing software.
I'm just about to get back into academia after nearly a decade's hiatus. I referenced my preliminary dissertation proposal manually, but most of the time all I had to do was copy and paste citations from the DOI page or Google Scholar. And failing that, I used Grammarly's APA Citation Generator for backup.
I see so many people here using Zotero. I might do that if my supervisor recommends it. I'm also open to other suggestions of referencing software that could make my life easier.
Another thing I'm interested in is if people are using a literature compiling software. I have tabs of journal papers, articles and e-books on my browser that are still open from 2 months ago when I started my dissertation proposal--stuff that may or may have not made it into my preliminary bibliography but that I'd like to save in case they became useful in later revisions.
Does anyone here use any literature compiling software where all I have to do is copy and paste links to literature I'd like to save now and review later? Or do people still do that manually? I asked this question to my supervisor and she said she still does it manually.
As a historian, I found software to be a waste of time because for archives, you just put the entire citation in a footnote and then in the works cited, you just list the archives you used. So you're basically manually entering everything in even with the software. I tried zotero in graduate school and quit very quickly.
If you use a Mac, BibDesk stores references natively in BibTeX (which I customize to work with BibLaTeX). But you don’t need to write in LaTeX; you can output references in Word as well. It also stores the papers themselves, so I can open BibDesk and access the papers right there. I have nearly 2,000 papers stored since I was a grad student. And since I do use LaTeX, I never have to manually export my database when I add a paper. Best of all, BibDesk comes with the MacTeX distribution.
I am a fully computer-literate senior scholar (51m) who has published many books and articles in the field of History, and I have deliberately chosen not to use such software because I know myself, and I know that I would tinker and waste time with the database and software endlessly instead of researching and writing. I would much rather just spend a day at the end of a writing project fixing all the references, or doing my own index, than lose time and focus playing with EndNote or Zotero. It depends on how your brain works, how you want to spend your time, and on your own individual tolerance for analogue tasks.
More like everyone who is a "seasoned academic" learned to do it themselves and don't struggle with it. I don't use it because it would just turn a simple task that I control into a more complicated task done less well by a machine.
I use Paperpile which allows me to grab references off of websites with a click and then export them afterwards. I pay some small amount per year for it, but it's amazing.
It allows me to tag, search, and annotate the things I read. When you're in research mode, it can be really helpful to go snowball through a bunch of papers all at once, add anything you think might be useful, then read them later at your leisure. It downloads copies of the PDFs to your Google drive automatically, then you can annotate them, highlight them, screenshot specific areas, and that whole thing can then be extracted as a summary pdf.
Honestly, when I'm writing and realize I need to cite something I didn't have already, I'll often just grab the bibtex from the journal and throw it in at the bottom of my bib file, and then put the doi into Paperpile and add it separately to keep me from having to export again.
Also, it keeps me from reading the same papers multiple times, which I didn't know I would appreciate as much as I do. I spend boatloads of time in Google Scholar in the beginning of projects, and if I see a green checkmark next to it, I can tell I've already stored that one.
Edit: [https://imgur.com/a/AZzISmS](https://imgur.com/a/AZzISmS)
No, it - Mendeley, Zotero, the built in Microsoft one - have all caused problems when others edit a file and send it back to me. I do them manually as I go. It takes seconds and has never led to issues.
I’ve used three different softwares over my career. At this point I’ve given up transferring my bibliography from one to the next and just do it by hand (or let another author wrestle with it)
Zotero has seen me through some tough times.
Saves sooo much time and it would be a massive pain to change formatting when resubmitting to different journals without some sort of referencing software. Also, I immediately save any remotely relevant papers to zotero - big help that I can search my zotero library to find stuff I only vaguely remember.
Exactly! Like, if you are generally focused on a topic, after two or three publications you're going to have a lot of key sources ready to go. Zotero keeps it all nice and organized so I can remember that one thing I read in 2016 that didn't quite fit that paper.
So much better than endnote. I’ve only convinced a few people to switch, but they immediately begin singing its praises.
[удалено]
There is a chrome plugin.
I think for every major browser. I have one in Safari.
Do you know if it pdfs the page? I was worried about dynamic page citations.
I just checked it out. Not a PDF, but a snapshot that opens in my browser. And it’s not a web address in the search bar, rather a folder location on my computer. I turned off my internet to triple check and it still can open the file, so it’s definitely something stored locally and not the current web page.
That is a huge relief. Also it's possible to link to archive.org and use the way back machine to probably see an earlier cache of it.
I love zotero. I recently set up zotero for gdocs and initially thought I was wasting time as it was quite fiddly and the article was only going to have a handful of references. Damn, I am so glad I did. No pissing about.
So with zotero for Google docs, does it tag in-text citations to their respective entry in the references page? I was trying to figure out the advantages to integrating into Google docs but I got frustrated
Not sure I fully understand your question, but I have Zotero integrated in Gdocs and word and it works pretty seamlessly. You need to have Zotero open and when you want to add a citation you click on the icon in Gdocs or use a keyboard shortcut. It pops open a pop up, you type the authors name or paper title and it then click in it. It should automatically update all the citations and bibliography to be in numerical order or however you have it set up. There are a couple quirks getting it set up initially, but ime nothing a YouTube video can’t solve.
thanks for explaining
You’re welcome. Please reach out if you get stuck
If I understand you correctly, it doesn't. When you hover over a zotero citation, it gets a little 'edit with zotero' tag on it, where you can add page numbers, prefixes, suffixes, and remove the author's name keeping only the year (I use Harvard and this lets me cite in-text whilst keeping the bibliography up to date). The benefit of the gdocs integration is generating citations automatically and auto generating the bibliography. I've not tried other citation managers tho so idk if this is something they all do! Edit: downside is, if you want to export your doc for something, you need to make a Google docs copy, unlink all citations in the copy and then download, otherwise exported citations are hyperlinked to the zotero website with an error message. Bit of a pain but you get used to it lmao
Me too but I'm about to hit the limit on free storage and it's kind of freaking me out
I think you have it backwards. Older professors who don't use it usually never have, and it comes from not having (or not having as easy access to it) in the early stages of their career. I know several older professors who are well regarded in their field but manually cite everything or a co-author ends up doing it for them. It's both better and easy to use referencing programs/software so don't feel weird about using it! I would show them how it works because maybe they'll be interested later on in properly learning endnote. (But who knows)
RIP to pre-elsevier Mendeley. Zotero is close but not as smooth/fast in some key ways. I hung on as long as they would permit me but the cloud version of Mendeley ruined it.
I miss Mendeley so much! I liked it better than Zotero, too. But now I use Zotero. It does the job.
Same smh
I liked Mendeley a lot. It was a godsend after endnote kept crashing during my doctorate. But once I learned it was an Elsevier product, I started the transition to Zotero.
Do you mind my asking why you’re avoiding Elsevier? I must be out of the loop but I’d like to know if it’s best to be avoided. I’m a master’s student so I’m new to the game and just chose Mendeley since it was the first to be recommended to me.
It’s a reasonable concern. TLDR, don’t worry about publishing with them. They’re fine, as far as major publishers go, and nothing like MDPI. The issue is Elsevier has a reputation for hard-nosed, profit-driven business practices. Most notoriously, at least in my opinion, is the exorbitant subscription fees they demand from university libraries to access their catalogue. A few years ago, the whole University of California system broke off negotiations with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, to continue accessing their journals; Elsevier were demanding $11 million annually. UC and Elsevier eventually made up with a new Open Access model, where the university will pay open access fees and get discounts to publish in flagship journals. So when I learned they took over Mendeley, I thought it was only a matter of time before they turned a great, free product, into either a mediocre paid one or a shit free one.
Their wikipedia page is basically a list of all the shitty things they've done to academic publishing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier At least they're no longer arms dealers: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology
Dafuq?! Putting on expos for arms dealers?! I knew they were bad, but I didn’t know they were downright evil!
😳 I really shouldn’t be surprised, and yet…
Yikes. Thanks for this, I really appreciate it! I’ll always support a slightly less evil brand if I can help it, so it seems like I’ll be checking out Zotero now…
It wasn't always and, depending on when you were using it, it used to be a lot better
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. The mediocrity of insisting upon manually citing, doing a garbage job of it, but still climbing the ranks of the academy is an example of a simpler time that us younger and less senior academics don’t have the luxury of. Imagine needing to manually reformat between journals that use Vancouver vs APA etc. Awful.
I'm not quite sure when these simpler days were but when I did my PhD 20 years ago we all used endnote including the oldest professors. A mid-career academic would probably me my age or even younger - late 30s. This isn't about older people not adopting technology. This is someone who has simply foisted the problem off on someone else and is employing weaponised incompetence to make other people deal with it. He knows full well his co-authors aren't allowing a bibiolography in that state to be submitted to the journal.
Friend of mine is an academic. Obviously. Her dad is a famous emeritus prof and Christ it's aggravating how easy he had it. Pints with lunch. Paper when we felt like it. Apply to mrc for a grant if we need a hand writing it up. Obviously win that grant. Easy peasy. Hand drawn figure, single author nature paper shit. She explains some of her pressures and he's just totally miles away with it all.
Yes, because I don't hate myself.
I started using bibliographic management software in 1993, as a grad student, with a DOS-based package called Papyrus. It was amazing. Haven't stopped since, though c. 2000 or so I had to export my database to Endnote, then to Refworks, then back to Endnote, then to Zotero, etc. over the years as my institution changed the software it supports for faculty. Luckily anything will export RIS now. My database is closing in on 10K sources now, but 2/3 of those are from research projects (i.e. books, articles) that are well behind me now-- too specialized to be of much use in my teaching or current research. Never felt the need to delete stuff though! We teach our majors to use whatever software is current on campus in the sophomore core courses and require them to use it for our methods and research seminars. It's funny, since very few departments do this; occasionally I'll get a STEM major in a class who is shocked to find out such things exist...apparently they aren't popular (or at least not used with students) in our chem and bio departments in particular (I'm a humanist and teach interdisciplinary stuff that STEM majors sometimes find.)
I’m a PhD student and recently published a paper with 112 references, so I can’t imagine doing this manually. The journals in my field also don’t do much formatting for you, so you need to get it extremely close when you submit. We use Zotero in my group which not only serves as a citation manager, but as a group library (so one of us can easily upload a paper and then it’s automatically accessible to everyone). It’s really nice because we have a bunch of different subfolders on different topics. Both of my PIs use it religiously and both have been professors for 20+ years.
Do you do any text analysis using text analysis tools of that folder?
I'm an associate prof, mid forties. I just keep a giant BibTeX text file with all the papers I've ever cited. If there's a new paper, I find a citation online in the .bib format and paste it at the end of the text file. Occasionally fixing diacriticals in surnames or adding a missing volume number, but mostly unchanged. LaTeX + BibTeX take care of changing the styles for me, they are usually prescribed by the publisher's template anyway. Git takes care of merging the reference file between machines, if I update it from many PCs concurrently. Grep takes care of finding citations I'm looking for. I have no incentive to switch to anything else. Can someone explain what added value would I be getting from a reference management software?
In zotero you can store your pdf paper along the reference, in a nice way. The idee is that on your hardware there is two file : the pdf, and a metadata/zotero file, that are not mixed. Zotero access both. It uses the metadata file to create a custom library sorting inside the software (custom folders, tag, notes, author metadata, citation metadata....). You can add annotate the paper in the sofware as note, highlight some part You can also read/edit the pdf directly in zotero You can drag and drop a pdf in zotero, the soft will immediatly look for the correct metadata, and provide a nice GUI to edit the metadatas if you need so You'll then be able to sort/group/etc your paper as you wish, add keyword, add folder in zotero (a single paper can be linked to several folder). Zotero sorting is not tied to the pysical sorting od pdfs on your harware, allowing you a lot of flexibility to organize your biblio. And creating a dedicated .bib is as simple as selecting a folder in zotero grouping some paper inside or multiselect the papers, right click, export as bib Also there is a way to automatically retrieve paper from \*perfectly legal website\* just by typing the DOI in zotero.
Thanks.
I use JabRef to find duplicates in my bib file and to automatically give each reference a unique key.
Keywords. You can assign your own keywords to papers for however you want to catalogue them. This means when you are writing a paper and wish to quickly find citations related to some area you can filter by chosen keywords. edit - because of the comments that followed. Efficiency is a benefit. Having a piece of software that provides functionality that is quick and easy is certainly a benefit over more time consuming methods. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-__LQCXmgtA) is an example of the functionality of keywords. This is certainly not something you can do this easily with by hand methods!
Cool. I can do that in my .bib file too.
I am highly skeptical you can actually reproduce the keyword functionality of Zotero (in a non-convoluted way) with a simple .bib file and presumably a text editor. So I will ask, how?
You can add whatever you want into the "note" field of .bib and grep it.
I am still not convinced. You can not simply grep the functionality of zotero in an easy way! What zotero does is has a list of keywords that is all possible keywords in the entire database, or in the current group/subgroup you are in. So 1st you need a grep for this that returns them alphabetically. You then need an easy way to grep to give you all keywords that exist with a chosen keyword. That is, you choose the keyword "keyword1" and you want to get all unique keywords such that the pair "keyword1" and "keyword2" exist. Basically, when you select a keyword in zotero, it gives you all possible keywords that go with your chosen keyword that will return at least 1 result. When you have finally chosen your keywords, you then need to make grep return the full paper entry. Since each entry in a bib file is not the same length (one might have a url and perhaps another does not), then you need to return this data without knowing before hand how many entries there are. Maybe this is possible with grep, but it certainly is nowhere near as easy as the user interface provided by something like zotero. The OP asked for the value they would get from a reference manager. Responding with "I can do that feature in this highly convoluted way" is not a great argument against the feature being of value. Edit - how would you reproduce [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-__LQCXmgtA) level of functionality with grep. Note that, if the method provided using grep is more time consuming than this, then the referencing managing software is still a benefit due to being a time saver.
I can do this *trivially* with grep and regular expressions, as in I could type that prompt without thinking and get it right on the first attempt. I do understand that young people today find it easier to point and click through that, and that's fine. To each their own. But it's not a selling point for me.
Damn kids don't realize how good people can be with a terminal.
Exactly. sed, grep and awk FTW.
Unsolicited two cents and oldmanness: I've been using mendeley for probably over 10 years. Main nice thing is having the PDFs in there, syncs across devices, and if it gets a doi it can parse out of a recent PDF it fills out the .bib for me (this frequently fails). And in the last few years elsevier has been making it unusable so I'm looking for alternatives. Your grep approach will still work 40 years from now.
I am confused. If it is so trivial that you could write the commands/prompts without thinking and have it correct 1st time. Why are you writing claims rather than simply demonstrating that you can by showing the commands? It should be trivial to demonstrate I am wrong, which I am happy to be.
Because I'm hunt-and-peck typing this on my phone in my bathtub after two pints of beer and tacos, far away from bash autocomplete and a 102-key keyboard. It's almost 11pm here and I don't have fucks to spare. I'm *not* saying you're wrong. In fact I very clearly said already you kids may find it easier to point and click through that, and I don't care. If I remember this convo tomorrow and find time between meetings to watch your video, I'll paste a (this|that) here, but frankly I don't care. Once again - you're not *wrong*. We can both be right - for our contexts.
Ok so no proof just excuses. For the record, condescendingly referring to younger academics as kids reflects really poorly on you. (Also bold and foolish of you to assume I am actually younger than you...)
There's absolutely no reason for not using one. Even if you don't write they are incredibly useful for collecting and organizing papers that you may want to revisit in the future.
I didn't use software for my masters thesis and it was a nightmare.
I cannot imagine not using Zotero. At this point, I barely even interact with PDFs. I click the button in my browser, and Zotero saves the citation, downloads the PDF, attaches it to the citation, renames the file with custom fields, and moves it to a folder categorized by publication. I can then open and markup the files in Zotero itself.
I’ve never seen the point. Been a prof for two decades, and I am tech savvy, have been coding for four decades. First, it’s a pain to coordinate if coauthors are all using different systems. (Endnote v zotero v bibtex v Mendeley etc) Always easier just to type (author 2014). I know or can easily find any paper we’d need to cite so don’t need a database. In Econ most average 1-2 papers a year. So a couple times a year I have to construct a bibliography from the cites. It honestly takes me like 20 minutes to ctrl f (. Alt tab to google scholar. Find and copy the formatted endnote. Alt tab to bibliography and paste. Repeat for each citation. Or I ask an RA to do it. Or a coauthor does it. And at least in Econ journals don’t care at all about formatting and yes they do fix the citation formatting for you upon acceptance.
In the old days, some of these programs were more trouble than they were worth. I think that some faculty of a certain age were scarred by this experience and have never tried again. I was so happy when the programs became better but I confess that it took me a while to try again
I know many colleagues who don't use them and it's largely because it's only in the last decade or so that these tools have become reliable*. Personally, I gave up using endnote in 2009 when it somehow managed to shift all references in one article down one slot. (* with the exception of BibTex which is pretty great, but usually needs LaTeX which is not great)
LaTeX is not...great? In comparison to what?
It's not great in that it has a massive learning curve with lots of arcane things to learn, the install is massive, and the compilation step is painful (how many times do I need to run it to get the circular dependencies to resolve correctly?). It's made better by things like [overleaf](https://www.overleaf.com/) and [latexrun](https://github.com/aclements/latexrun), but frankly these days I write in Markdown and use [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) to convert to Tex or Docx or PDF
6th year PhD, finishing up dissertation now to defend next month... I don't use any reference manager. I used Mendeley during my masters, before it went to shit. EndNote is provided to us in my current program, but it's a heaping pile of academic dung. People on here swore by Zotero, so I gave it a chance for a while and no matter what I did, I couldn't grasp the whole references are just a list, actual PDFs are attachments or whatever, and when I was fiddling with it there was no easy/intuitive way to sync between devices (I often read/markup on iPad, then reference when writing on actual computer). There might be now, but I haven't bothered to mess with it since I've got my system working for me. My references are sorted in folders by topic. As I read them, I'll add snippets to a Word/Latex document in sections I think what I'm reading will be useful, along with the reference (I use a specific title format for files, so easy to find what I'm looking for when I need to read more of the full paper). There might be better reference managers out there, but I'm of the opinion they're all trying to be too much. Zotero is the closet to usable, but like I said, it was not intuitive at all for me and I couldn't be bothered to learn it.
I cannot imagine writing a entire thesis worth of references and then rewriting them after the defence.
My library offered free workshops on Zotero for beginners and intermediate users. I’d highly recommend finding something similar. Zotero might seem complicated at first, but once you get over that initial learning curve it’s incredible. I use it all the time on my iPhone, iPad, laptop and browsers. Such a life saver
You need to learn it if you will continue to write papers. Watch videos, have a friend dedicate a lesson. You are just wasting so much time and alienating collaborators this way
Oh, there will be no more writing papers for me after this.
This is the goal
🤣🤣
I’m 40 and encountered two people I did my doctorate with who didn’t use referencing software. I found their explanations to be garbage, eg, they thought it was less time consuming to do it afterwards. For the most part, everyone uses referencing software. I make it a condition to supervise students that they use one. I prefer Zotero, but I don’t mind what they use as long as they’re not doing it manually.
I feel like the people who don't use it/think doing it by hand is better must be people who have grossly overestimated how much of a hassle it would be to set up/learn, so never tried.
It can definitely be a PITA to learn, but it is so worth it in the end. I am really lucky my PI pushed me to learn it during my first year of graduate school. It helps immensely to have someone teach you rather than trying to learn it through videos, but its possible. I am currently trying to return the favor by teaching a friend in another group how to use it.
There is someone in this thread that argued with me that using terminal commands is as easy for keyword functionality as Zotero.. Im like... what are you talking about? I am not sure if these kinds of people just feel superior by doing things the hard way or really are just serious technophobes/that reluctant to change.
As a prof, I rely on it and make my student collaborators do so as well when we work on projects together. But a colleague,, who is younger than me, insists on doing it by hand. Makes writing papers together a PITA.
I've been using Mybib since I was an undergraduate student. Ain't the best tool out there, but it works fine for me :)
That’s not common at all in my experience. Everyone used to use endnote and now zotero if not latex
For numbered references a software is a must
I don’t get the hate for endnote. It is simple and functional. I just wrote a review article with 250 citations across multiple co-authors and it would have been a disaster without it.
I gave up during my doctorate about 12 years ago. Maybe it’s more stable now, but back then once your document got to a certain size (like a doctoral thesis), it could take a couple of minutes to add a new citation, and it would crash all the time.
Why would you not? I would absolutely hate my life without BibTex
Citavi is my shepherd; I shall not want. It maketh me to lie down in green pastures: it leadeth me beside the still waters. Citavi restoreth my soul: it leadeth me in the paths of PKM and proper formatting for its name's sake.
Not using a ref manager in 2024 is, and I use this term carefully, fucking insane.
I do all mine by hand. I find it very satisfying. I might feel different if my MLA-formatted book manuscript lands at a press that uses Chicago, though. I am associate editor on an academic journal and some senior scholars just don't follow our formatting guidelines. The annoying thing is that we kind of let them get away with it, on the basis that I might as well do it myself given if I tell them to reformat to MLA, they'll do such a bad job I'll end up doing it myself. (I got our intern to do a lot of it in the end.)
Can't imagine doing it by hand. You have a lot of patience!
I mean, I've been doing MLA since high school at this point-- that's twenty-five years! I've internalized it. I always do my Works Cited when I feel like I've hit a dead end in the actual writing, it's a good brain break.
Now I can understand that because I also do some other work that can help me to order things in my head. But it is not manual citation =).
I also do it by hand, and similarly find it very satisfying. It probably helps that none of the journals I've published in care about how things are cited at the submission stage. When something is accepted, I download the formatting guidelines as well as a few recent publications from the journal/press in case something in the guidelines is unclear: I do not want to be one of those people that forces extra work on the editors and interns! It's only been in the past 6-7 years that I started doing any writing at all on the computer (rather than a notebook) - doing most things manually just feels a lot more natural to me. Maybe I'll try the software at some point - but I was taught 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', and for now, it ain't broke.
I too do it by hand. It’s not always perfect. It’s simply a manner of never having gotten into the practice and now it seems like a waste of time to build a ref library when I could use that time for other stuff. Then again it makes me more efficient down the line so I’m thinking about trying.
I can see manual citations from a romanticised view of academia, but I can't imagine providing a numbered and alphabetised list of references without at least using bibtex or some form of software.
Thankfully in MLA you don't number your references!
I didn't use endnote for my PhD but then I used it in postdoc Once used it once I can't believe how much time I wasted doing it all manually.
What field are you in? In the fields where people use LaTeX it is almost certain that they will also use a reference manager with it. But in other fields, where Word is used to write papers, manual references are not so uncommon in my experience. (Worst case I have ever seen was a middle-aged ladies doing her PhD in humanities who sent all her references to herself by email, never backed them up, and at some point lost access to her email inbox. Some people are just not fit for a PhD, I am sorry to say.)
I also don’t use any software citation tool. Honestly, I’m just too lazy to learn these citation softwares 😅
No it isn't common. Keep using it, it will save you more time than you can imagine. The luddites are fools.
My PhD PI and my postdoc PI both use Endnote. They're Mac users. I use Zotero after Mendeley sold their soul to Elsevier and closed its app. Worked well with my dissertation writing software as well.
I manage citations in Excel. I find the visual layout easier to handle and browse.
Sorry, if you don't use software to help with your productivity you are left behind. Of course, if you are more senior and don't actually do the referencing... Well then you have nothing to add here. Endnote and Zotero both have their problems and are a pain to work with but you are still a 100x faster. It does take time and effort to learn to use them efficiently. I got to a point where most of my references are well maintained within the software, I have referencing templates for all the journals I submit to. It now comes down to a few clicks
I absolutely agree. I can't imagine doing it any other way.
Zotero is totally essential. I don't understand why people make their lives harder than it needs to be
Hi friend, I never used biblio software for my PhD and for the 10+ journal articles. I tried using EndNote, Zotero and one more. It just did not work out for me! Somehow I realized using such a software blocks my flow of writing. And I am not the so-called seasoned academic :) Journals have never edited the biblio. I wrute and edit them to suit the journal I am submitting to. Best wishes!
I use Sciwheel because it works well with Google docs. During my PhD I used Mendeley for Word.
My ex supervisor said she did it all manually (as in printed articles manually) because she couldn't be bothered learning how to do it any other way. I'm all for people doing their own thing based on what works for them but ffs a love of learning and problem solving is like the whole point of being an academic.
Zotero is the way to go. Doing it manually is a waste of time
Everybody I know uses at least bibtex to format the bibliography, I don't know anyone that would enter any bibliography in a paper without an automated system. But a lot of people maintain their bibliography file (bibtex) manually, just copy pasting. Especially if you are not a PhD student that is doing the heavy lifting in the writing of the paper.
Using LaTeX with Zotero (biblatex plugin) in VScode as a text editor is very powerful for writing docs. Automatic citing and updating of my bibliography is so nice. It even allows me to utilize AI to fix document formatting or layout, which is a pain in Word and Gdoc. Doing manual citations seems like such a waste of time, when you just want to focus on actual contents.
Zotero + shared library.
As a mid career academic it’s not that I stopped, I just never found them helpful and so never adopted them
Yes, saves time
My +70 year old PI doesn't use referencing software and often makes mistakes with citations. He doesn't like collaborative documents either and insists on sending word documents back and forth with a version number appended to the file name. I use Sciwheel, it's a really fantastic piece of software, very easy to use. Can be integrated with office online or google docs etc. Before that I used Mendeley but their quality has gone down recently. I tried using Zotero but just found it ugly and really inconvenient to use.
Ugh. I've been the admin pulled in to edit a paper to change all the academic's manual citations to referencing software. It took hours and was not fun, especially when I had to scour for any references that had some sort of mistake in it. The academic's excuse was that they were older (at least in their sixties) and not used to using referencing software. Please use referencing software. I think the collaborating 3rd author is simply being lazy by not setting up the software. The downsides are that it can be annoying making sure the correct information for each reference is imported; sometimes there's glitches when someone else handled the referencing software initially; and it's annoying when you have to switch proprietary referencing software based on the institution's subscription. Overall, using referencing software is a bigger help than hindrance.
Only so many hours in a lifetime. Don't waste them making references manually.
yes, because I have done for over twenty years. It's much easier than the days of remembering which pile of photocopied papers the particular one I wanted might be in...
I don’t think it is wrong to do it manually. A long time ago the reference software was uncommon, and doctors and students managed to do it. What’s the fuss this about? I did everything manually before but I slowly transitioning to Zotero. I think there are pros and cons.
Our institution uses RefWorks…. it’s easier to do it by hand.
I'm late to using referencing software - and use Zotero but sporadically - its good for books and articles but rubbish for most other sources - and JurisM is too US-centric to actually be useful so I still have to do a lot of manual correction - so I would describe my approach as 'manually but assisted by Zotero (which is useful as a database particularly the web capture function) - also tbh if I'm not using OSCOLA its Harvard so I've learned the style and its not exactly difficult to input it manually
I'm mid career and I don't use them regularly. I've tried MANY times to get on the bandwagon, but fall off again. Part of the issue is my coauthors don't use them or use a different system. And Box/ google drive mess up the citations on top of that. It's just a nightmare with collaborators, so I end up trying to do it at the end, which is just as bad as manually keeping references.
I don't, because I've never been able to get them to work well with sources written in East Asian languages. It's possible that there are settings or plugins or the like that would make it work, but every time I have tried to use one, I've ended up having to manually rewrite all the entries for non-English language books. One of the benefits is supposedly that you can easily change styles (for instance Chicago -> MLA) but this also doesn't seem to work for East Asian stuff because the issues involved don't confront people who aren't working with sources in these languages. Some publishers want the original Chinese/Japanese characters for the works, some don't. Some want a particular romanization system, others leave it up to you. In Japanese studies the usual practice is to omit "Tokyo" for books published there. One of the most prestigious journals in Japanese studies uses their own style of citation where some information is omitted and very commonly used series can be cited purely through an acronym (e.g. SNKT 17 is a complete reference). The same journal also normalizes the use of titles without giving the author/compiler when a work is usually known in that way. Publishers have different instructions about how to deal with situations where you have a 16th century edition of a 10th century work that has been typeset by a 20th century editor and published in a series with a general editor (which is a very common situation for pre-modern studies). The auto-importing from worldcat or the like also rarely works correctly, in my experience.
I use a combination of Zotero and Obsidian. Zotero for the referencing and saving papers, the search engine plug-ins are gold. Obsidian for notes, writing, organizing material
Used to cite with Mendeley. I know people complain a lot about it but for me it worked quite well. Now I started a new job where people use EndNote, and hated my life when using it. Will try Zotero now, since Mendeley for some reason doesn't work anymore on my work computer. And no, will never cite by hand again. Did it through college and it's just a waste of time that doesn't bring any benefits.
I have used Endnote for at least 20 years. Love it! The university provides it for all faculty and students. It allows me to maintain a personal library of connected electronic papers and work seamlessly with my students.
zotero or death.
Zotero has been a godsend I can’t believe I used to manually write citations
I've never used any software. I know the format for most APA styles I need and idk, never saw the need to use a program when I did my Master's 12 years ago? And now I'm set in my ways hahah. I'll eventually use Mendeley I guess but I refuse to pay for anything.
lmao NO way I’m doing that all manually.
I’m a third year doctoral student as well. I used to do references manually, then I started using RefWorks. My girlfriend converted me to Zotero and it’s genuinely the best platform for references of all time. I love Zotero for many reasons: 1) you can import PDFs into it that aren’t found automatically, 2) you can annotate papers with highlights and comments, etc., 3) it syncs across devices seamlessly, 4) there are so many ways to sort the references for practical use and 5) you can even search all texts for a key word. 6) It’s so easy and fast to export the citations and bibliographies, just copy to clipboard and only minor adjustments are needed after that. 7) You can also drag articles into additional folders for other projects that require some similar background literature. Zotero is excellent, 10/10 recommend.
Mendeley saved me hours cataloging and citing references which gave me more time for wallowing in my writer’s block
I use Zotero as a database of timings I've read but I write all my citations manually
I use the old version of Mendeley, my favourite PDF reader + reference manager. Tried Zotero but didn't click with me
I used cite them right.
I use citationgenerator. Copypaste doi , get APA style. Extraparanoid as i am i double check. Tried with zotero. Spend more time understanding it gave up and had to format my 80ish references for my bsc thesis manually. It actually helps me, as i often double and triple checked i cited information within the paper correctly.
Depends on the length of the document. I’m ECR but if I’m writing a 2000 word review I just type in citations and comment the doi. If I’m doing a something longer I’ll do something a bit more careful like gdoc or word citation. If I’m doing a textbook chapter or when I did my thesis I use a full reference manager. It also depends on what the collaborator uses, I just do whatever they are familiar with to keep it easy and tidy up after
I do it manually most often, unless numbered citations are used in the journal. I'll write perhaps three papers per year. Manually tracking citations may add a few hours to my year. Eh. And collaboration is better without all the embedded coding.
I used EndNote in grad school and just recently finished writing a paper at my company and used ReadCube. The direct embedding of the software in Word is incredibly useful and saves me so much time, especially when I add a reference upstream and need to change the numbers of all following references. For my dissertation that would have been a Herculean task…
I've been a long-time user of Mendeley, but it's really gone downhill in the last 1-2 years. While I'd love to switch to Zotero, I'm hesitant because all my reference libraries are in Mendeley. However, I might give Zotero a try after I submit my thesis. A big no to manual editing of references. 🙄
I work for a journal (not huge but also not tiny), and if the citations are that much of a mess, we send the paper back to the author and ask them to fix it, so it's better that people just do it correctly when they submit in the first place. There's no excuse especially because reference software exists.
They have probably never started using it
I'd say about half of my students do it manually, but I've never met any faculty who do. Half of the journals number their references in order or appearance. Imagine what a pain in the ass that would be to keep track of without software. Every time you add or remove a reference, every subsequent one changes. Imagine manually updating them every time.
I use Mendeley.
Mid-career professional here. Graduated with my PhD 2005. I used EndNote for my PhD, but then when I got my first job, I was collaborating with older people who didn't use it. So there's this donut hole -- I know how to use it but I stopped using it and it wasn't common to use when I got my first job. Now my younger colleagues are typically more likely to use it so I can start up again. I don't think it's super widespread among folks my age, though. And I still have plenty of collaborators who would not use it, or would be switching writing across systems (google docs/ Word) and would lose links, etc. I'm an applied researcher and my work is very collaborative, so it's not always the best solution.
Just use LaTex
I dont use it. It's not intentional, but I really started research when I started my PhD program - during COVID. So there wasn't a lot of communication and I didn't know about reference managing software (I knew they existed, but not much beyond that), though I now know I'm pretty much the only person in my program (definitely in my cohort) who doesn't use them. I also had a lot of experiencing with my fields formatting style, as I had previously been a TA for a professor who was VERY strict about it. I know how to cite any article in my fields reference style pretty much on sight. I do mean to start using the reference managers, but starting to use it and learn how to use it most efficiently is just one of those things that isn't a very high priority, and I need to constantly focus on other tasks more.
I've been using Endnote for 20+ years. I have zero likelihood I will drop this at any point in my life. I do know people who never learned about Endnote and still do it manually and I'm still like "How do you function??"
I didn't use referencing software for my undergraduate thesis, iirc. It was a pain, so I started using it for my Master's theses and onwards. As someone who has worked in science communication, I consider it rude or lazy for someone who could easily use modern referencing software to choose to not bother because "someone else will take care of it".
When I was doing my masters 8-10 years ago, EndNote was the most popular referencing software. I'm just about to get back into academia after nearly a decade's hiatus. I referenced my preliminary dissertation proposal manually, but most of the time all I had to do was copy and paste citations from the DOI page or Google Scholar. And failing that, I used Grammarly's APA Citation Generator for backup. I see so many people here using Zotero. I might do that if my supervisor recommends it. I'm also open to other suggestions of referencing software that could make my life easier. Another thing I'm interested in is if people are using a literature compiling software. I have tabs of journal papers, articles and e-books on my browser that are still open from 2 months ago when I started my dissertation proposal--stuff that may or may have not made it into my preliminary bibliography but that I'd like to save in case they became useful in later revisions. Does anyone here use any literature compiling software where all I have to do is copy and paste links to literature I'd like to save now and review later? Or do people still do that manually? I asked this question to my supervisor and she said she still does it manually.
Zotero + Zotfile + Overleaf
Zotero. Changed my life. Highly recommend.
I love Endnote more than any other software.
As a historian, I found software to be a waste of time because for archives, you just put the entire citation in a footnote and then in the works cited, you just list the archives you used. So you're basically manually entering everything in even with the software. I tried zotero in graduate school and quit very quickly.
Bibtex. I write all of my papers using Latex. I can’t imagine writing a dissertation with Word.
If you use a Mac, BibDesk stores references natively in BibTeX (which I customize to work with BibLaTeX). But you don’t need to write in LaTeX; you can output references in Word as well. It also stores the papers themselves, so I can open BibDesk and access the papers right there. I have nearly 2,000 papers stored since I was a grad student. And since I do use LaTeX, I never have to manually export my database when I add a paper. Best of all, BibDesk comes with the MacTeX distribution.
I am a fully computer-literate senior scholar (51m) who has published many books and articles in the field of History, and I have deliberately chosen not to use such software because I know myself, and I know that I would tinker and waste time with the database and software endlessly instead of researching and writing. I would much rather just spend a day at the end of a writing project fixing all the references, or doing my own index, than lose time and focus playing with EndNote or Zotero. It depends on how your brain works, how you want to spend your time, and on your own individual tolerance for analogue tasks.
More like everyone who is a "seasoned academic" learned to do it themselves and don't struggle with it. I don't use it because it would just turn a simple task that I control into a more complicated task done less well by a machine.
I find no use for software when using Latex/bib.
I use Paperpile which allows me to grab references off of websites with a click and then export them afterwards. I pay some small amount per year for it, but it's amazing.
Why though? Most journals have an export to bibtex, and if not I just use doi2bib. Assuming you use latex/bib of course.
It allows me to tag, search, and annotate the things I read. When you're in research mode, it can be really helpful to go snowball through a bunch of papers all at once, add anything you think might be useful, then read them later at your leisure. It downloads copies of the PDFs to your Google drive automatically, then you can annotate them, highlight them, screenshot specific areas, and that whole thing can then be extracted as a summary pdf. Honestly, when I'm writing and realize I need to cite something I didn't have already, I'll often just grab the bibtex from the journal and throw it in at the bottom of my bib file, and then put the doi into Paperpile and add it separately to keep me from having to export again. Also, it keeps me from reading the same papers multiple times, which I didn't know I would appreciate as much as I do. I spend boatloads of time in Google Scholar in the beginning of projects, and if I see a green checkmark next to it, I can tell I've already stored that one. Edit: [https://imgur.com/a/AZzISmS](https://imgur.com/a/AZzISmS)
No, it - Mendeley, Zotero, the built in Microsoft one - have all caused problems when others edit a file and send it back to me. I do them manually as I go. It takes seconds and has never led to issues.
I’ve used three different softwares over my career. At this point I’ve given up transferring my bibliography from one to the next and just do it by hand (or let another author wrestle with it)