Resources MOLECULAR MEDICINE TODAY. FEBRUARY 1997

Personal references Back in the ‘good’ old days (about ten years ago), if you needed to find a particular reference you might have spent an afternoon lifting weighty vol- umes of /ndexMedicusin the library. Having found the entry you wanted, you then copied it onto an index card, added this to your file box and searched the library for the journal. Finally, when you were ready to publish your work you could pull out the index card, type the reference into your manuscript and modify the format for your chosen journal. All these activities are now fond memories References are now readily available in electronic format (on CD-ROM or even direct from the World Wide Web), and many clinicians and researchers can search the literature from their offices or laboratories without leaving their patients or experiments. Gone are the index cards: references can be downloaded directly into your personal reference-database, auto- matically inserted as citations into a manu- script and formatted for the journal of your choice. If the referees or Editor decide that your manuscript ‘would be better-suited to another journal’, reformatting the reference list will only entail a few minutes’ work. But with all this computer power, how do you decide which of the many bibliographic ref- erence management software packages is the most appropriate one for your use? Here we compare four software packages (End- Note Plus 2 for Macintosh and Windows, Reference Manager, ProCite and Papyrus) that represent the heavyweights on the mar- ket (their vital statistics are in Table 1).

Gathering references Although references can be entered manu- ally into your personal database, they can also be gathered electronically by saving the ref- erences from an online database to a file and then importing this into your personal database. This saves considerable time and avoids much of the pedantry that is a feature of bibliography. How- ever, only Papyrus comes ready to do this; all the other programs require you to buy an import pro- gram at considerable additional cost (on average an extra 30%). You certainly cannot live without these link programs, so it’s important to budget for them.

References in personal databases are stored in a range of templates, depending on whether it is a journal article, a book or a conference pro- ceeding, for example, and this provides the necess- ary flexibility when it comes to formatting your bibliography. Even so, there is a bewildering array of these templates and not all (for example, music scores) are relevant to the biomedical literature.

in one database, or simply want to have multiple different databases, EndNote, Reference Manager and ProCite all allow you to do this. Remarkably, the Papyrus license is limited to just four databases, which seems rather arbitrary and restrictive.

References in the databases are indexed and there are subtle differences in the way that each program builds and uses the index. However, they

all allow searches to be restricted to indi- vidual fields or subsets of references, and wildcards or Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) between terms can be used.

Getting the information out The power of these programs lies in their ability to take the chore out of compiling bibliographies for papers, lectures and handouts. All the programs allow refer- ences to be inserted as citations in the text of a word-processed manuscript. The ref- erence or group of references is simply selected in the database, copied to the clipboard and then pasted into the manu- script. Some of the programs (ProCite and EndNote Plus) come with plug-in modules for Microsoft Word that add specific com- mands inside the word-processor menus so that you do not need to have both pro- grams open at once.

Once your manuscript is filled with ci- tations, you select a specific publication style for the layout of your references and the program zips through your document inserting the in-text citation and organiz- ing your reference list. Each program comes with a number of predefined styles for different journals, ranging from 30 in ProCite to over 240 in EndNote Plus 2. If this is not enough and the journal you want is

Once you have collected your references, all four programs allow you to search for, and discard, duplicates and to edit any information in any field.

Using your database The references in your personal database can also be searched and sorted; the number that you can have in any one file is considerable (EndNote Plus2,32 000; Reference Manager, 65 000; Papyrus and ProCite are limited only by memory and disk space). Even if you reach the limit of references

not listed, then it is not difficult to customize your own style. If, once the manuscript is formatted, you find you need to add a reference or change the style, all the programs will do the renumber- ing and modifications automatically.

The light at the end of the tunnel or the train coming towards us?

Nothing in the world of computers stands still and, in the time that it has taken to put this review to- gether, new developments have appeared and there

Copyright 01997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All tights reserved. 1357 4310/97/$17.00 PII: S1357-4310(96)60017-3

M<II~EClILAK MEIIICINE IOI~AY. FEBRUARY ,997 Resources

are rumblings of what is to come. The introduction of the World Wide Web has provided a wealth of information accessible to many. Indeed, there is an extensive review of bibliographic software (httpz/Mww.chorus.cycor.ca /biblio/bibrev.html) available on the Web.

ProCite and EndNote have developed link pro- grams that allow references to be exported in hypertext markup language (HTML) so that they can be published on the Web. The same program allows the user to incorporate and catalogue the uniform resource locator (URL) of documents on the Web into their own ProCite or EndNote reference databases. BookWhere Pro from Sea Change Corporation is a program that is designed for browsing the scores of university library catalogues available on the Internet. The infor-

mation retrieved is then downloaded directly into ProCite.

The danger is no longer that we will not be able to find the reference we want, but that there will be too many to find. Help is at hand shuffling towards us in the form of a knowledge robot or ‘knowbot’. This is an intelligent search engine that interprets the type of information that is of interest to you and learns from previous search experiences. Knowbots will then search the world literature automatically and keep you informed on a ‘need-to-know basis’.

In ten years’ time this bibliographic reference management software will look as dusty as the copies of /ndexMedicusdo now. Nevertheless, most of us cannot afford to wait that long to publish and so must use the tools that are available today. The software we have covered here is powerful, easy

Package Producer Hardware requirements

to use and too good to be without. Sadly, we must wait for the knowbot that will tell us which journal will accept the manuscript that we have written.

Wendy Roberts Assistant Librarian, Cambridge University Medical Library, Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Hills Road, Cambridge, UK CB2 2QQ.

Jeremy Rashbass Clinical Director of Biomedical Computing,

Cambridge Clinical School, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Hills Road,

Cambridge, UK CB2 2QQ. Tel: t44 1223 217163

Fax: t44 1223 216980 e-mail: jem@mole.bio.cam.ac.uk

Table 1. Bibliographic reference management sofhnrare packages compared

Price (UK price excludes i VAT, postage and packing)

-

EndNote Plus 2 for Windows (DOS version 1.3 and Macintosh version 2.1 also available)

Papyrus v. 7.0.12 (DOS; can work under Windows: Windows and Macintosh versions in progress)

ProCite v. 3.1 for Windows (DOS version 2.1 and Macintosh version 2.1 also available)

Reference Manager v. 7 for Windows (DOS version 6.0 and Macintosh version 2.1 also available)

Niles and Associates, Inc.,

800 Jones Street, Berkeley, CA 94710, USA. (http://www,niles.com)

Research Software Design, 2718 SW Kelly Street, Suite 1.31, Portland, OR 97201, USA. (http://www.rsd.com/-rsd/)

Research Information

Systems, 2355 Camino Vida Roble,

Carlsbad, CA 92009, USA. (http://www.risinc.com/

procite/procite.html)

Research Information Systems, 2355 Camino Vida Roble, Carlsbad, CA 92009, USA. (http://www.risinc.com/ rmprod.html)

IBM PC or compatible with a 386DW25 MHz processor (or higher); minimum of 4 MB of RAM (8 MB recommended)

470 kB RAM plus hard disk

IBM 386 (or later) or compatible; 4 MB RAM (8 MB recommended); 8 MB available disk space

80383,80486, IBM AT, PS/2 or compatible: 2 MB RAM minimum (4 MB recommended); hard disk with at least 3MB

EndLink 2: f991 US $99

Papyrus: f84/US $99

ProCite with Biblio-Link II: f299hJS $395

Capture: f100/US $149