If you’re writing and researching, you probably have faced a common problem – how to best organize the articles you’re reading and what to use when creating bibliographies and formatting research papers. Finding articles has become quite easy through online library databases, like IEEE Xplore, SciFinder Scholar, PubMed, and even Google Scholar.
Now that you found reams and reams of good stuff, how can you keep it from becoming a jumbled up PDF mess on your desktop? Luckily, there are various tools available to help you get your work sorted out and organized, and even better, the Library offers you an upcoming workshop to help you get right to the bottom of what tool might work best for you.
Each tool has different strengths and features, some of which might appeal to you more than others, depending on what is important to you. For example, maybe you want to automatically upload and extract metadata about the PDFs on your computer or perhaps creating custom bibliographic styles is the ultimate feature for you. Understanding what each package offers can help you decide which one will work best for you and save you time in the long-run. Imagine having more time to write your paper rather than trying to hunt down the great article you read or figure out how to create a specific bibliography in RefWorks.
Even more good news…some of these tools are free and online…but still wondering which one you should use? Give us one hour and we will provide you with an overview of five popular tools currently on the market: RefWorks, Endnote, Zotero, Mendeley, and Papers 2. You’ll also get an opportunity to try some of these tools live. Participants will come away understanding the bottom line about what each of these tools offers and the best reason to use it.
Reservations are preferred, but if you find yourself in the Brody on Wed, September 12 at 11 am, please stop by. Since the workshop is in the BLC, please BYOW (bring your own wireless-device). Hope to see you there!
Hi Jonathan,
Those are good suggestions. In the meantime, if you want to see the comparison page for the tools covered in the workshop, it is available at http://guides.library.jhu.edu/content.php?pid=16431&sid=158869 under the box that says “Comparison Shopping”. Thank you again.
Hi, I notice that the guide page you link to at: http://guides.library.jhu.edu/content.php?pid=115232&sid=1216478
only mentions Zotero and RefWorks. (It also mentions something called ‘EasyBib’ in the title, but doesn’t actually say what it is or how to use it). If you EndNote, Mendeley, and Papers2 are useful enough to include in your workshop, perhaps it would make sense to mention them on the guide page too, for those learning about options from the guide page who don’t seem this blog post or take the workshop?