Hi,

Does anyone have any recommendations as to which software I should use to collect references?

Mendeley and Zotero are free, whereas I'd have to pay around a £100 for EndNote, to get a license on my personal machine. Which one do you use?

More on Mendeley here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/05/mendeley-activate

I use endnote, but only because its what I started the PhD with. If I had my time again I'd use Mendely because I've not heard a bad word against it, it sounds amazing and great to use if you work in multiple locations e.g. home, work, cafe etc.

hmm, I'm not sure if you can export from google scholar - maybe someone else can confirm?

ah, looks like you can http://www.mendeley.com/blog/academic-features/mendeley-bookmarklet-released-one-click-import-from-google-scholar-pubmed-arxiv-acm-ieee-etc/

I've been using Mendeley for a couple of months now following a previous recommendation on this forum. So far it's been good and I've been able to use it all the computers I work on. The only issue I have is that as far as I can tell it doesn't support the exact same referencing format my department requires for a reference list (it may be there and my department does seem to be very particular in what they want) although admittedly I haven't spent that long going through the different formats because it's a bit boring tbh! Therefore a bit of manual editing is required.

I mostly use it offline and update it regularly so I can access my pdfs and notes anywhere. Biggest bonus is it's free and the main reason I chose it was because I had heard so many bad things about endnote both here and in my department from other PhDers.

I use endnote because its on the Uni system so everyone I know uses it but I gather its really difficult to get the data off for future use? So wish I had gone with something different at the start. Its quite limited for notes too. Can you put more detail in the other systems?

I'm really liking Zotero at the moment, Cate. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so if you're an Internet Explorer type then it's not for you! It's very easy to download and, of course, free! It sits as part of your web browser (sits in the bottom right hand corner of your web browser screen and you get full screen when you click on it. You can import directly from most electronic journals and JStor etc. and can link to existing pdfs you have too.

You can use it in offline mode too but of course it won't sync to the zotero site during that time. That's the other thing I like about it - it's like having another back up as you have an online account at the zotero web site.

In terms of finding stuff, you can tag each article/ book with a series of tags and it has a powerful search tool too. Note-taking is good in the program too - you get a fully editable window and can write one long note (I've certainly not hit a limit yet) or any number of separate notes attached to the same article/book.

Doing a endnote like Cite as You Write is also well set up in Zotero - and there's a useful forum with what looks like a very personalised service for any trouble-shooting. The only negative is that it's not set up to work with Word for Mac 2010 yet but I'm sure it will be soon, so I'm going back to Word for Mac 2008 for a bit til they sort that.

Hope that review (as well as the rest on this thread) helps you make the right decision, Chococake and Cate!

Hi Chococake, you're right Mendeley does support Harvard and my department is based on Harvard with irritating minor changes! I'm not sure about getting things from uni catalogues, I tend to just download pdfs and then dump them into mendeley and this seems to work well. You can also add a web importer tool but I don't tend to use it because it just seems to import the reference but not the file. It also has a cite while you write tool which is very useful.

At least if you choose a free one and you don't like it then you won't lose any money :-)

Hello.

You may benefit from taking a look at http://www.qiqqa.com.

The software is written specifically for post graduates who need to deal with the massive amounts of documents one has to read in the course of a PHD/similar.

It aims to get you through your work quicker (hence "qiqqa"). It's free.

All the best.