Reference-Manager

I discover new things everyday … I wrote earlier that I really liked Zotero, a reference management software. However, there is one thing that was missing, imho: the capability to import PDFs (individually or in bulk) and correctly fill in the various fields of the reference. But in fact, this already exists in Zotero! Just drag a PDF in the middle section (the reference list) then right-click on it and choose “Retrieve Metadata from PDF” (*). Retrieval of the title, the authors, the journal, etc. everything goes very fast and they are stored as a normal reference, now on the right. ...

For my work I need to reference a lot of statements, mainly with papers and books in the biological / medical literature. Usually “professionals” use two proprietary software, Reference Manager or EndNote (both owned by Thomson Reuters). But there are a few very interesting free alternatives (see this comparison of reference management software). I switched from Mendeley to Zotero a few weeks ago and I’m very happy. Here is why …

Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software package. It is extensively used in biomedical research, along with Endnote (sold by the same company), mainly because the main OS in these labs is Windows from Microsoft. I used it at the university and still have some reference databases in its format (with file extension .rmd). This evening, I had to go back into one of those proprietary, closed databases I still had (most of my references were later re-entered in a BibTeX file). I could have borrowed my wife’s computer running Windows or tried some Open Source software that can open .rmd files. But it would have been too easy. So I tried it with Wine, a program that allows Microsoft Windows applications to run under Linux. In Wine AppDB, it is written people had tried version 9 and 11. In the old time, I bought a student license for version 10. ...