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Bibliographic management tools

Mendeley: reducing the lag in research impact analysis

9 Aug, 12 | by BMJ

Mendeley, the free reference manager and academic social network, has released an Institutional Edition for research and impact analysis and signed up a number of leading academic establishments along the way.

Announced on Monday, Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) is a module developed to give librarians and heads of library insight into the way researchers work and use their library collection at document level. By offering the MIE to their end users, institutions can seemingly stimulate their productivity and gain real-time feedback on the usage of library content.

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ReadCube: just another reference manager?

26 Jul, 12 | by BMJ

Last month, ReadCube (a free, cross-platform reference manager) announced a host of new features in the form of  ‘enhanced PDFs’. Articles published by Nature, PLOS and Wiley can now be enhanced with active in-line references and automatic fetching of supplementary data.

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Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle – the finalists

18 Nov, 11 | by BMJ

PLoS and Mendeley recently closed their Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are some big names on the judging panel, such as Tim O’Reilly (coined the term ‘Web 2.0’), James Powell (CTO of Thomson Reuters) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com).  The entries have been whittled down to 11 finalists and the winner will be announced on 30th November 2011. Read on for details of some of these finalists or go here a full list: http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle more…

Tracking scholarly impact on the social web: altmetrics

4 Nov, 11 | by BMJ

Tim Berners-Lee created the Web as a scholarly communication tool but some argue that the Web has revolutionised everything but scholarly communication. One of the major adherents of this view is Jason Priem, co-founder of the altmetrics project, whose website states:

In the 17th century, scholar-publishers created the first scientific journals, revolutionising the communication and practice of scholarship. Today, we’re at the beginning of a second revolution, as academia slowly awakens to the transformative potential of the Web.

In growing numbers, scholars are moving their daily work to the Internet. Online reference managers, such as Zotero and Mendeley, have grown in popularity, the latter claiming to store over 120 million articles (substantially more than PubMed). As many as a third of scholars are on Twitter and a growing number cultivate scholarly blogs. more…

‘Add to Mendeley’ buttons now live on all BMJ articles

19 Aug, 11 | by BMJ

In a previous post, we introduced Mendeley, the reference manager and academic social network that’s taking the research world by storm, even scooping an award in the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards. At the time of writing, Mendeley reports that 1,113,597 people have signed up and over 106 million scientific papers have been uploaded. Medicine is a particularly popular discipline, with over 8 million papers and almost 3,000 groups.

Over the past few weeks we have been working with Mendeley to help you better organise your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest medical research. We are in the process of sending Mendeley a complete metadata set, so that full and accurate bibliographic data of all BMJ articles are stored in the Mendeley database. In addition, we have incorporated a ‘web importer’ button across our journals at article-level, so that it takes just one click to add any BMJ paper to your Mendeley library. more…

Optima: Web of Science and Endnote in ScholarOne Manuscripts

9 Jun, 11 | by BMJ

A key feature of the new manuscript submission system being used by the BMJ Journals is its connected functionality with other Thomson Reuters products, namely Web of Science and EndNote. Through Optima, authors can create their manuscript in EndNote and seamlessly submit it for review using ScholarOne. Its integration with Web of Science also means that reviewers and editors have one-click access from the manuscripts to the times cited, related records, and links to the full record files, allowing for a well-organised and proficient reviewing process.

Authors can upload their manuscripts from EndNote directly onto the submission system

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Mendeley: a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science?

15 Apr, 11 | by BMJ

Recently crowned winner of the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards in the education, recruitment and jobs category, Mendeley, a research collaboration tool, has enjoyed a good deal of coverage in the press. It’s often referred to as “a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science” and  Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, was even reported to have said that if they got it right, they could change the face of science. more…

Zotero – how to manage your references more effectively

4 Aug, 10 | by BMJ

Like Endnote, Zotero is a bibliographic management tool. It works within your browser to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. There are also Word and OpenOffice plugins which allow you to insert citations directly from your word processing software. This makes citing multiple pages, sources, or otherwise customising citations a breeze. In-text citations, footnotes and endnotes are all supported.

How does Zotero work?

On many major research websites such as digital libraries, PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon.com and now the BMJ journal websites, Zotero detects when a book, article, or other resource is being viewed and with a mouse click finds and saves the full reference information to a local file. If the source is an online article or web page, Zotero can optionally store a local copy of the source.

Users can then add notes, tags, and their own metadata through the in-browser interface. Selections of the local reference library data can later be exported as formatted bibliographies. Furthermore, all entries including bibliographic information and user-created rich-text memos of the selected articles can be summarized into an HTML report. Watch the video below for an overview of Zotero’s capabilities.

In addition to making the process of collecting references very simple, the iTunes–like interface of Zotero makes them extremely easy to organise. Drag and drop items between collections, or use the search feature to locate citations. Zotero offers a variety of methods so that you can organise and annotate your citations however you like.

With a simple plugin for Word or Open Office, Zotero lets you insert and manipulate your citations while you write. The software supports all major citation styles, and thousands of journal styles. You can also use it to generate quick bibliographies to share in email, blogs or anywhere else. For a thorough explanation of the Zotero Word plug-in, watch the following video:

How do I get started?

Everything you need to get started is listed below in three easy steps:

1. To run Zotero you will need use the Firefox Web Browser. If you do not already have it, you can download it for free here.
2. Once you have Firefox, then you can download the Zotero plug-in from here. This page also contains links to an orientation video and the Zotero quick start guide.
3. Finally, if you want to integrate Zotero with your word processor, you will need to download an additional plug-in here.

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