Customer Reviews

Reference Manager 10.0

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Reference Manager is a huge time saver for students as well as professors. Right out of the box, it is very intuitive to figure out how to use this program to insert citations into papers and format your references. A toolbar in Microsoft Word makes it easy to insert citations while you write either individually or en masse. Click, click, click. When you finish the text, you can choose the reference format you need. Get rejected from one journal? You just click a few buttons to reformat your in-text citations and reference list rather than spend hours deleting periods from authors' names.

Directly exporting references from search engines is very handy, too. This way you have a well-organized database with full reference information that you can keep coming back. This is not always a perfect process, but comes close enough.

Another option for building a reference database is to tell Reference Manager what sort of references you need, but I don't recommend this method. It is easier to work with familiar search engines that are formatted for your field than try to go through an unwieldy middle-man.

All around an excellent product to help you write research papers and to establish a personalized electronic library for yourself.

Reference Manager is a feature rich citation program with the potential to dramatically reduce the time required to format and organize citations. With enough experience it can become realtively intuitive, though some of the special features may take a considerable amount of time to learn. I consider myself an advanced, long-term user. Unfortunately, RM still suffers from some annoying bugs, depending on the Word processor you use. Most of these relate to the font in the title in the bibliograpy. Earlier versions RM would cause titles to appear only as symbols. Version 10 can cause only one type of font to appear (eg."arial") with abstact, and possibly other, categories. The website shamelessly admits the former problem and suggests a way to fix it (which causes the latter problem). Another annoyance is the fact that the formating for many (I would say "all") journals is not perfect. Spaces still appear where they shouldn't or don't appear where they should. Journal name formatting can be a chore as well. In the end, RM may consume more time than it saves. Many of my colleagues have turned to Endnote and have convinced me to switch as well, but at this time I have no experience with Endnote and cannot comment.