Bibliographic management applications (BMA) : Mendeley and Zotero

Zotero is another of these tools. It can be used through its website and its own application (Zotero Standalone). It is ideal to share your documents with other users, by creating groups of users. You can store up to 300MB of documents if you don’t want to pay for additional storage.

This is my library in Zotero, as seen from the web:

Zotero – my library

To create a document press the + button, you can add the data manually.

Zotero – create item

There is also a Firefox plugin to automatically save documents to Zotero and Zotero standalone extensions for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. You can find them in Download.

I have downloaded Zotero standalone and joined the group “Aplicaciones TIC en los Estudios Ingleses”. I have imported one pdf document to my library, and another one, called “Learning ESL Vocabulary with Smartphones” to the group library, using the “Save to Zotero” icon on the address bar. I have also practised to add citations and bibliographies using the Zotero OpenOffice plugin.

Mendeley is similar, but free accounts only let you have groups of maximum three members. Here you have a comparative chart  of several BMAs. It can also be used through its website and its application (it also has an application for Android and iOS) and has a web importer.
Mendeley offers you the opportunity to share your publications. It is more oriented to be a social network in which you can also work in groups.

I have joined the group: https://www.mendeley.com/groups/5133551/aplicaciones-de-las-tic/.  I have downloaded the Web Importer and searched in JSTOR “As you like it” and “The Tempest”. I have shared a document in the group I had created and I have left another one in one of my folders. I have also uploaded a pdf document I had from another search.

Mendeley

I think both are great to share documents when you are working in a team. I haven’t used them very much and I think I will use Refworks much more than them, but I want to try them all more.

Bibliographic management applications (BMA) : Refworks

This is a very important tool we have learnt to use in one of the webconferences.
BMA are tools used to organize the documents you are using in your project and they also help you create the bibliography section.

We will also talk about Zotero and Mendeley soon.

RefWorks – home

If you don’t link your Refworks account to an institution you can still use a 30-day trial account. You can create this account from outside UNED using a group code (you have to ask the UNED library for the code). I have used my UNED account.

RefWorks – create account

RefWorks- Create account 2

You can add your references here:

RefWorks – add reference

Where you can

• add the data manually:

RefWorks – add reference manually

• import it from a file:

RefWorks – import references

• or export the references you want, you can download the file or send it to your e-mail account:
  

  RefWorks – export references

You can also search in your references and in by different parameters, also in several databases and save the results, and even subscribe to RSS feeds.

RefWorks – search

You can create folders here, I have several of them as you can see.

RefWorks – create folder

Here you have the contents of one of them:

RefWorks – one of my folders

There are two tools you can also use: I have not used them yet:

– Write-N-Cite: MS Word plugin which sends your references from Refworks to your document with a few clicks.
– RefGrab-It: browser bookmarklet which captures bibliographic information from web pages and import them to Refworks.

This is one of the most useful tools I have discovered during this course. I think it is very easy to use and great to organize!