Wednesday, 7 September 2011

Thing 14: Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike

Organising your references... I can see why you might want to use these, but to be perfectly honest, I've never bothered.  To me, they seem like an extra layer of hassle.  I'm sure that those of you who have fallen in love with RefWorks, EndNote, or other such proprietary software may relish the chance to get your hands on a free version that does much the same thing.  My institution uses RefWorks, but I've never had the need to know anything about it.

I've never had so many references that I haven't been able to organise them myself, with a spreadsheet that I can colour-code, sort, filter and organise like any other data document.  I don't think I need another piece of software to do my collating.  If I'm researching something, I reference as I go, but seeing as I'm glad to be out from under the yoke of studying and I can't see me rushing into any further academic study, I really see no value for me in these tools.

If you're studying, they may be useful, and I was shown cite-u-like when I did my dissertation, but after the presentation I didn't bother using it.  Does that imply that my organisational skills are pretty good already, or that I'm just happy doing things my way (or that I'd completely forgotten about the presentation by the time I got home from the study school...)?

I might try out Mendeley (because you can scribble on pdfs, apparently, and it can organise your documents for you), however, I don't need the others because I'm not studying or researching and I don't do teaching.

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