Now that we have a number of online reference managers to choose from, I thought it would be interesting to look at their popularity – both in absolute numbers of visitors and the in changes during the last 12 months. Online tools such as Compete allow everybody to do just that, and their basic functions are free to use.
The scientific articles we write are uniquely identified by Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). Many people believe that we also need unique identifiers for the authors of those articles. Some of the arguments why author identifiers could be very helpful are found in this interview with Geoffrey Bilder, this Researcher Identification Primer, and this FriendFeed discussion.
A recent Nature News article by Geoff Brumfiel (Science journalism: Supplanting the old media?) has stirred up many interesting discussions about the relationship of science blogging and traditional science journalism. Good starting places to follow these discussions (and engage in them) are Technorati, Nature.com Blogs and FriendFeed. Science blogging extends, but also threatens traditional science journalism.
Practically all scientific journals now use web-based systems for paper submissions and peer review. This saves the authors a lot of time compared to paper submissions by postal mail (until 15 years ago) or email (until 5 years ago). Unfortunately the submission process is still far from perfect and requires authors to spend many hours formatting manuscripts, references and images instead of focusing on the scientific content.
Citations of the relevant literature are an essential feature of scientific papers. Reference Manager software helps adding these citations and creating a bibliography. Are there differences in how reference managers work together with your word processor of choice?Support for your favorite word processor Support for word processors other than Microsoft Word is spotty.
18 April 2009: I've updated the chart and added 2collab, the “Read” category, sharing of PDF files, and the Mendeley bookmarklet and full-text search. 15 July 2009: I've updated the chart to indicate that Mendeley and L abmeeting have integrated PDF viewers and that 2collab can search Scopus. 20 July 2009: I've added the offline version of RefWorks for Windows, EndNote OpenOffice plugin, and
Zotero is a reference manager built as an extension of the Firefox web browser. The best introduction to Zotero is probably this short video. Last week the newest version (1.5 beta) was announced on the Zotero blog. Among the most exciting new features is the synchronization of library data with the Zotero server, which in the future will allow a lot of interesting social features.
Finishing an exciting research project and writing it up in a paper are the first two steps in getting your work published. The next two steps – submitting your paper to a journal and getting it through the review process – have changed dramatically in the last 10-15 years.
Papers is a great Macintosh program to manage the PDF files of scientific papers on your (Macintosh) computer. I've mentioned several times that I like the program and I interviewed the author Alex Griekspoor back in October.
Almost exactly two years ago, CrossRef invited a number of people to discuss unique identifiers for researchers ( CrossRef Author ID meeting ). One year ago Thomson Reuters launched ResearcherID ( Thomson Scientific launches ResearcherID to uniquely identify authors ). And two months ago Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink wrote about this topic in a PLoS Computational
