Selection of reference management tools for creation and managing the references for academic purposes: A Comparative study

Abstract

With changing times the publishing industry has adopted various standards of reference, bibliographic standards in publishing the electronic content such as books, articles, theses and dissertation, websites, data, e-publications, videos, white papers and more. Managing of such references is becoming challenging day by day for users. To overcome this problem, many references management tools are available in IT environment to collate and manage citations and references to help the users, research scholars and faculty. However with the advent of reference management tool. It has been possible to correct format for citing references in research papers. It is also important to remember that scholars don't have to wed their self to any one tool as each has its pros and cons, and one can use different tools for different purpose. One can usually exchange references/citations between different tools quite easily, so if a researcher start using one tool and decide to move to a different tool, researcher can transfer all their references/citations and not have to go out and find them again. Following are the major reference management tools which discussed in this paper 1) Mendeley 2) Ref works 3) Bibliotext 4) Zotero and 5) Endnote. A comparative study has been done for available reference management tools which may help the users to decide which one is the appropriate and more user friendly for their research work. The paper studies the problem which occur while using the reference management tools and how to overcome those problem using alternative tools and converter etc.