Discovered, that many of my students have the same problem: how to manage references in scientific works. Just recently one of my students posted on Facebook (paraphrased): "...I hate academic referencing and it's taking him a lot of nerves...". Well, he is right, academic referencing
is a real pain, if you don't have the right software that does the work for you. I assume that most will simply number references by hand, add the numbers in the reference block of the paper, and format the reference by hand. Definitely - this is a pain, costs a lot of nerves, and makes academic referencing to a torture.
During my study times (a long time back), we learned Latex. And by learning Latex, we started to use also Bibtex and learned how to work properly with references. But it seems, that many do not do today, and referencing software is not widely used among students, and considering the price level of the software, it's understandable that it is not accessible for many. But luckily, there is a really very good open source solution, but many seem not to know about it. Let the software do the formatting as well as the reference management!
As a PhD student, I was switching to a commercial tool. At the first sight, it sounded like a cheap tool. I thought I can keep this for years... I also liked this commercial tool, if there would not have been one drawback: with each new office version (and this includes sub-updates, service packs) you had to update the tool. This would definitely not be a problem, if the commercial provider would provide them for free. At the end I ended up buying the tool almost each year. Thus I searched for a free and non-commercial option. And these options are compiled within this blog...
To ease the pain of academic referencing, I compiled a little list of links for students, that are searching a cheap and open source solution for managing their references:
DocEar and DocEar4Word PlugIn
Docear is a really very good solution for managing academic literature - besides acting as reference software, Docear also allows to manage documents while writing the thesis. However, don't forget to download the word plugin :). Unfortunately sometimes this software does not work properly, and if the file containing the references is malformed, it can cost quite a bit of knowledge to discover the bug. But as the software is also an excellent tool to organize literature sources, allows to organize comments inside PDFs, and mind-mapping of the collected literature - it is definitely worthwhile to use it while writing on your thesis, or research paper.
Docear: http://www.docear.org/
Docear4word: http://www.docear.org/software/add-ons/docear4word/overview/
JabRef and Bibtex4World PlugIn
The most stable version of free tools that I have been finding was JabRef. It worked for me since quite many years, and despite I myself switched to DocEar, I always combine JabRef and DocEar. I use the Docear4Word Office plugin in combination with JabRef as reference editor. It is a quite reliable solution. However, JabRef stores the references in Bigtex format - and sometimes the file is malformed. The DocEar word plugin in this case does not work properly. As I am experienced in Latex and Bibtex it's easy for me to find the bug, but for someone who is not experienced it's tricky. The Word plugin of JabRef avoids this bug, and is more stable in comparison to the DocEar plugin. Thes the following two tools are fully sufficient to create a suite of easy referencing. And the good thing, as the fileformat is based on Bibtex, you can easily switch between both...
JabRef: www.jabref.org
Bibtex4World: http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/hp/staff/dmb/perl/index.html
A Few Hints & Tricks
- many online databases allow Bibtex export of citations - just export them as Bibtex, and import them with the tools above. No typing of them anymore :)
- Docear4word has a little problem - despite using the IEEE with URL style, URLs are not displayed. To resolve this problem, I have been writing a new style. Just cope the source code in the Appendix A of this blog post into the style directory as described in http://www.docear.org/software/add-ons/docear4word/citation-styles/. However, rename the source code filename to: ieee-w-url-mod.csl
P.S. Devoted to the student who published the comment on Facebook - may many be helped with this blog entry!
Appendix A: New Docear4word style: ieee-w-url-mod.csl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" version="1.0" demote-non-dropping-particle="sort-only">
<info>
<title>IEEE with URLMod</title>
<id>http://www.zotero.org/styles/ieee-w-url</id>
<link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/ieee-w-url" rel="self"/>
<author>
<name>Michael Berkowitz</name>
<email>mberkowi@gmu.edu</email>
</author>
<contributor>
<name>Julian Onions</name>
<email>julian.onions@gmail.com</email>
</contributor>
<contributor>
<name>Rintze Zelle</name>
<uri>http://twitter.com/rintzezelle</uri>
</contributor>
<category field="engineering"/>
<category field="generic-base"/>
<category citation-format="numeric"/>
<updated>2009-11-19T11:34:34+00:00</updated>
<link href="http://www.ieee.org/portal/cms_docs_iportals/iportals/publications/authors/transjnl/stylemanual.pdf" rel="documentation"/>
<rights>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/</rights>
</info>
<macro name="author">
<names variable="author">
<name initialize-with="." delimiter=", " and="text"/>
<label form="short" prefix=", " text-case="lowercase" suffix="." strip-periods="true"/>
<substitute>
<names variable="editor"/>
<names variable="translator"/>
</substitute>
</names>
</macro>
<macro name="editor">
<names variable="editor">
<name initialize-with="." delimiter=", " and="text"/>
<label form="short" prefix=", " text-case="lowercase" suffix="." strip-periods="true"/>
</names>
</macro>
<macro name="title">
<choose>
<if type="bill book graphic legal_case legislation motion_picture report song" match="any">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic"/>
</if>
<else>
<text variable="title" quotes="true"/>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>
<macro name="publisher">
<text variable="publisher-place" suffix=": " prefix=" "/>
<text variable="publisher" suffix=", "/>
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="year"/>
</date>
</macro>
<macro name="access">
<text value="Available" suffix=": "/>
<text variable="URL"/>
</macro>
<macro name="page">
<group>
<label variable="page" form="short" suffix=". " strip-periods="true"/>
<text variable="page"/>
</group>
</macro>
<citation et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" collapse="citation-number">
<sort>
<key variable="citation-number"/>
</sort>
<layout prefix="[" suffix="]" delimiter=",">
<text variable="citation-number"/>
</layout>
</citation>
<bibliography entry-spacing="0" second-field-align="flush">
<layout suffix=".">
<text variable="citation-number" prefix="[" suffix="]"/>
<text macro="author" prefix=" " suffix=", "/>
<choose>
<if type="bill book graphic legal_case legislation motion_picture report song" match="any">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="title"/>
<text macro="publisher"/>
</group>
</if>
<else-if type="chapter paper-conference" match="any">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="title"/>
<text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
<text macro="editor"/>
<text macro="publisher"/>
<text macro="page"/>
</group>
</else-if>
<else-if type="patent">
<text macro="title" suffix=", "/>
<text variable="number" prefix="U.S. Patent "/>
<date variable="issued" prefix=", ">
<date-part name="month" suffix=" "/>
<date-part name="day" suffix=", "/>
<date-part name="year"/>
</date>
</else-if>
<else-if type="thesis">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="title"/>
<text variable="genre"/>
<text variable="publisher"/>
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="year"/>
</date>
</group>
</else-if>
<else-if type="webpage">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="title"/>
<text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
</group>
<text macro="access" prefix=" "/>
</else-if>
<else>
<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="title"/>
<text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
<text variable="volume" prefix=" vol. "/>
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="month" form="short" suffix=". " strip-periods="true"/>
<date-part name="year"/>
</date>
<text macro="page"/>
</group>
</else>
</choose>
<text macro="access" prefix=" "/>
</layout>
</bibliography>
</style>
