Thing 14: Bibliographic Management Programs

For this thing we were asked to try out and discuss three of the freely available Bibliographic Management Programs: Zotero, Mendeley, and CiteULike. 

Honestly, while I have learned how to use these programs (RefWorks, Endnote, and those discussed here), I am old fashioned and do everything by hand. I find these programs are very helpful, especially if you are doing major research, but for my own work I have preferred to do it myself. 

I learned Zotero about 2 years ago and found it great that it was just in the browser and easily accessible. It copies and cites websites well, which is very handy. Although, I might prefer to use Evernote for webpages as it copies them so well. If Zotero could integrate with Evernote, I think the best form of web capturing, archiving, and sharing would be created (Disclaimer: I really love Evernote!). As Zotero is the free bibliographic management program I am most comfortable with I would stick with this one as the others were no better. I found Mendeley to be useful, and easily searchable for articles and other information. However, it does not seem to be that different from Zotero and it is not as easily accessible through the web browser for convenience. CiteULike was very bare bones and I feel that it is not up to par with Zotero or Mendeley. I would not recommend CiteULike since there are far better programs out there. I would recommend both Zotero and Mendeley, which is better comes down to personal preference.