Reference management systems
Very special thanks go to Burcu Avcı who alerted me to these - and they will in fact make your lives a lot easier when it comes to doing your literature reviews, which you will be starting on quite soon.
One of the biggest challenges when you are conducting a literature review is to keep the texts that you are going to be citing from in some kind of meaningful and easily accessible order. These pdf files will add up, regardless of whether you bookmark them on your browser or whether you download them to your hard drive. Another problem is that they will usually have numerical titles that make no sense whatsoever when you go back to look for the material that you stored. And a further problem is that oftentimes the metadata (the part that will actually make up your reference) will be hard to extract from the pdf file itself. A reference management system resolves all of these problems by running an OCR based check inside the document and then inserts all the information, such as the title, the author names, the publication data etc, so that you can easily see what is what when you look at the list that you have compiled inside the application.
One of the two good ones that I have found is Qiqqa, http://www.qiqqa.com/, which you can download and use for free (Windows only, I'm afraid). The free version allows you to store up to 200 MBs of pdfs online, however the size of the documents that live on your hard drive and that you can organize is unlimited. Qiqqa lets you find the metadata through a BibTeX sniffer, which is very handy indeed. There is a very nice instructional video on youtube that shows you how to use Qiqqa:
And more videos are also here: http://www.qiqqa.com/Home/Screencasts
My second suggestion for organizing pdfs is Mendeley (for Mac and PC), a
community based system that also lets you search through the papers that others have shared. You can download Mendeley as a desktop
application that will synch your desktop activity to
the communal Mendeley site: http://www.mendeley.com/. Below is a tutorial for Mendeley:
There are other web based systems that you can try out also, although at first glance their functionality seems to be somewhat limited in comparison to Qiqqa and Mendeley. One of the nicer ones that seems to have good features is Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/, and another one that works either as a Firefox plugin or as a standalone application is Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/. And then there is CiteULike which works through your facebook account: http://www.citeulike.org/home
Mac users may also want to try out Sente. Burcu showed me Sente on her own computer and told me that it is a great software which works a bit like i-tunes. The catch is that Sente is not free, after a month's trial period you do have to pay to continue.
And finally, a very well known reference manager is of course EndNote, brought out by Thomson Reuters who are the organization behind the web of science and the web of knowledge, the two prestigious repositories of citation indexed publications. (More on the importance of citation indexed publications at a later post). EndNote is expensive, a check on their Turkish partner site tells me that the full package costs close to 250 Euros.
There are other web based systems that you can try out also, although at first glance their functionality seems to be somewhat limited in comparison to Qiqqa and Mendeley. One of the nicer ones that seems to have good features is Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/, and another one that works either as a Firefox plugin or as a standalone application is Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/. And then there is CiteULike which works through your facebook account: http://www.citeulike.org/home
Mac users may also want to try out Sente. Burcu showed me Sente on her own computer and told me that it is a great software which works a bit like i-tunes. The catch is that Sente is not free, after a month's trial period you do have to pay to continue.
And finally, a very well known reference manager is of course EndNote, brought out by Thomson Reuters who are the organization behind the web of science and the web of knowledge, the two prestigious repositories of citation indexed publications. (More on the importance of citation indexed publications at a later post). EndNote is expensive, a check on their Turkish partner site tells me that the full package costs close to 250 Euros.