Useful reference management tools for academic paper writing

Doing research often involves paper reading and writing. Referring to other papers is almost inevitable when writing papers. However, sometimes, the processing of writing a paper is frustrating just because you forget which exact papers to cite when it comes to the section of related works.

So reference paper management is quite important for the academic life. There are of course various tools that help to make the job easier. Here is a few tools i've used or encountered.

Endnote

Endnote is not a bad choice if you write papers using Microsoft word, as it has plugins for MS word. Most online research databases offer the export format that can be imported into Endnote, and you can also enter your owns manually. Notes or comments of the reference paper can also added to keep track of your thinking. It provides a lot of formatting styles to choose when it comes to the last bibliography section, which saves a lot of time for tedious formatting. However, you probably need a few time to play around with it before you master it.

Endnote is not free. The good thing is that students at some higher eduction institutes and universities can use it for free as the universities often have a volume license.

JabRef

When I started to use Latex to write the papers, Endnote seemed helpless. Hopefully, JabRef came into my sight after a few search.

"JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.5 or newer), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X."

As most online research databases support BibTex exportation, so populating a JabRef database quite easy and straight forward. It also allows you to add links to the papers, so a single click can open the paper and allows you to have a second read. It offers integration to several tools. When I used WinEdt for the latex paper editing, the integration works quite good.

Zotero

When i came across Zotero, i've already been out of university for a while. So i haven't got a chance to play around it with real research tasks. But from what it says, it seems quite promising. So i've recommended it to my friends who are still doing fun researches in the universities.

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Other tools

Of course, there are plenty other similar tools for this reference management tasks. You can find the more complete list and the comparison at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software