Neuromag July 2016 | Page 10

REFERENCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS AND HOW TO USE THEM Written by Pooja Viswanathan So much of research tends to be a sort of chaotic self-directed learning experience, little nuggets of information coming from many different resources, sometimes with no way to tie them all together. Our lives today are much improved by utility tools and software that go some way in alleviating this problem. One quintessential tool that we will all use at some point in our graduate studies is a reference management software. I use three. Let me tell you why. I used some downtime at work (read: while training animals for months and months that disappeared into one another) to look at all the major reference management players. I prepared a chart comparing their various features. Many before me have prepared more exhaustive charts and lists . Reference management systems try to accomplish more than just managing references, so the most important thing to consider before using these helpful charts is which of the many available functions you are likely to use. Ask yourself these helpful questions: • Do you work on multiple computers/ operating systems? • Do you want to pay for one? • Do you need it to organize your library and/or citations? • What software do you use to write? • Do you need to share your now extensively curated library or citations with others? 10 | NEUROMAG | July 2016 The major functions can thus be reduced to reference manager, reference searcher, citation manager, and life easy-maker. I regret to inform you that I have yet to find the one software to rule them all, but I have found a system that works. I found that Mendeley takes care of many of these functions the best. It starts with being available as a standalone app for many platforms. This is helpful because I have a Windows PC at work, a Macbook for personal use, an Android tablet and an iPhone. I have Mendeley on all of them and can take any of my portable devices on my travels, to lab meetings, or conferences and have my library on hand. It is free, with some extra features for paying users. The free features are entirely sufficient for my personal use and allow me to have a shared folder with two lab colleagues. Mendeley has a browser bookmarklet that allows me to save PDFs directly to Mendeley’s free 2GB web storage option or my unlimited device storage. I ask it to kindly rename my PDF files when it stores them so that they all look neat and tidy and not ‘sss9320495-4jfkmd-fk-off.pdf’. I use Microsoft Word to do most of my writing, but Mendeley offers support for Open Office and LaTex and where it does not, it offers flexible ways to add citations in a few clicks. Mendeley has a web version as well, where you can search for papers in other members’ libraries and follow other members to get your social media fix. It does not quite hit the spot with free features for collaborations, but this is precisely how they draw in entire labs to pay for the premium features. Mendeley has a decent PDF viewer that allows you to annotate and star while reading. You can search for words, authors, titles, and journals to find the papers you want. It also has a superb indexing system, can extract meta data, finds duplicates to clear, and offers a vast library of citation styles you can personalize or edit. Another program named Zotero is very similar to Mendeley in all these features (although it only offers 300MB of free web storage) and is open source. I cannot speak for the stabil-