Citing sources is particularly important to academic authors. This description from Wikipedia explains why. Here we intend to cover the features of a few reference management systems. First, some words about referencing. See further below for the software applications reviewed.
About Citations / References (From Wikipedia):
Citations have several important purposes: to uphold intellectual honesty (or avoiding plagiarism),[1] to attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the correct sources, to allow the reader to determine independently whether the referenced material supports the author’s argument in the claimed way, and to help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the material the author has used.[2] As Roark and Emerson have argued, citations relate to the way authors perceive the substance of their work, their position in the academic system, and the moral equivalency of their place, substance, and words.[3]
The forms of citations generally subscribe to one of the generally accepted citations systems, such as the Oxford,[4] Harvard, MLA, American Sociological Association (ASA), American Psychological Association (APA), and other citations systems, because their syntactic conventions are widely known and easily interpreted by readers. Each of these citation systems has its advantages and disadvantages. Editors often specify the citation system to use.
Bibliographies, and other list-like compilations of references, are generally not considered citations because they do not fulfill the true spirit of the term: deliberate acknowledgement by other authors of the priority of one’s ideas.[5]
Software Applications to Manage Citations / References
Came across this a while ago and bought in. So far seems to have comprehensive features to manage citations throughout a writing project. Features include the management of research citations, task planning, and extensive library search functionality.
- Citavi: Creating comprehensive bibliographies is a strong feature of Citavi, obviously. I have entered my entire personal library into the system. Note that the Citavi search capabilities, make this process quite efficient and satisfying.
- Citavi: Export to Bibtex is a very useful feature, successfully used to produce a bibliographic list as under Content 2. below.
Content 1.: A big fan of theologian Paul Tillich, I used the online search functionality to put together a list of 545 publications that include “Paul Tillich” as author. Within minutes I had exported the search results from Citavi to an MS-Word file and show the .pdf link below.
Content 2: As described above I entered my entire personal library into a Citavi file. A recent version of the library database is published here.