Telstar

(More) Innovations in Reference Management

Today is the second ‘Innovations in Reference Management’, which the TELSTAR project has organised as parts of it’s dissemination and ‘Benefits Realisation’ activity.

The day is starting off with an introduction from Nicky Whitsed, Director of Library Services at the Open University. She reflects that it was 22 years ago that she was involved in implementing the ‘Reference Manager’ software (interestingly in medicine) – and highlighting the various trends that are pushing innovations in the area today – Information Literacy, Linked Data, the need to cite datasets as opposed to more traditional publications.

Now Martin Fenner going to talk about Trends in Reference Management. Also going back to ‘Reference Manager’ in 1985 – a personal store of knowledge and an index for a (print) offprint collection. Soon after this it became possible to import references using standards like Z39.50. By 1992 – article about EndNote Plus said “It is hard to imagine a reprint file management and bibliography generation program that does more than EndNote Plus”; “it automatically assemble bibliographies from inserted in-text citations”. Martin says we shouldn’t forget that for most researchers this is still the main use of reference management packages – and that things have not really changed much on this front since 1992.

However, then we have the web. Where previously we had Index Medicus, now we have PubMed freely available online. In 2000 the DOI was introduced. The web and online activity prompted questions of how we could share references with others. Some reference management s/w are completely online – only one copy of the reference which is stored online; other packages synchronize local copies of data with online storage (EndNote and Zotero take this approach). While there are many reasons to share references, Martin bringing us back to writing for publication – and the fact that you may be writing collaboratively and need to share references – and also the new online authoring environments such as Google Docs, Office Live, Buzzword etc. However, so far we haven’t seen good integrations of reference managers into these online writing tools. Martin suspects this is because of the niche nature of reference management.

Another idea that is perhaps obvious (says Martin) but took a while to be developed is storage of electronic copies of papers (usually pdf). Now seeing software which does this: ‘Papers’ – new software for Mac that manages references and pdfs (looks very much like iTunes). Also Mendeley recently launched which also manages pdfs. While many other packages allow you to attach pdfs to references, but not as tightly integrated as Papers and Mendeley.

However, once you have sharing, and you have attachment of full-text, you immediately have copyright questions raised. Even where there are more permissive licenses – such as Creative Commons – it may be that terms such as ‘Non commercial’ can cause complications – as this is about how the copy is used, not whether you make a copy.

By 2009 there are a wide range of reference management tools – Martin shows list of 15, but notes this is only small subset of available software/services. Martin says while they all tend to do the ‘basic’ tasks, there is a wide variety of additional features, and also vary in price (starting at ‘free’ for Zotero and Mendeley). But as an institution you won’t have the resource to support them all, so have to make a decision.

Martin now highlighting a few of the more recent developments in reference management software:

Mobile interfaces – iPhone apps (notes Nature iPhone app delivers papers in ePub format, not pdf). All references in Nature iPhone app are linked to online copies etc. Also iPhone app from Scopus – includes alerts etc. iPad – makes web based services like citeulike usable on portable device; Cell has been experimenting with different formats for articles online – not just pdf, and also additional services linked to document – but requires flash, so doesn’t work on iPad! PLoS has iPad app.

Challenge – does every journal get it’s own interface via an app? ‘Papers’ for Mac has an iPad version – can sync between desktop and iPad – gives single interface to all your pdfs

So Martin highlights:

• variety of mobile formats: PDF; ePub; HTML; Flash
• different types of mobile service: alerts; readers etc.

Martin now highlighting attempts to introduce unique identifiers for authors – mentioning ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID, http://www.orcid.org/). Previous schemes have been limited – by geography, discipline or publisher. ORCID is meant to be universal. The number of ways an author name can be expressed in a ‘reference’ is extremely large – even for relatively unique names. Also specific challenges dealing with names which are expressed in a different script to native language – e.g. Chinese names written in English script.

Idea is that when you submit a manuscript for publication, you have to submit your ORCID. Easier to do this for all papers going forward – challenge of going back and doing for all historical publications probably too big a job.

ORCID could be used not just for authors, but for other roles – e.g. reviewers, compilers (of data), programmers (of software).

Now over 100 organisations participating in ORCID initiative – but still much work to be done and things to be worked out. Has been agreed that the software developed by Thomson Reuters for their ‘ResearcherID’ will be reused to provide infrastructure/software.

Martin hopes to see reference management software adopting use of ORCID in 1-2 year timescale.

Will start to see new services based on ORCID – e.g. like biomedexperts – can summarise and authors expertise, and also see connections between authors (e.g. who has co-published with whom).

Martin mentions use of BibApp which allows collection of publications information for all researchers within an institution (open source software developed at University of Wisconsin and University if Illinois)

Martin mentions ‘CRIS’ (Current Research Information Systems) – good identifiers such as DOI and ORCID really help with these.

Martin suggests that using ORCID could make it easier to reference new types of ‘publication’ – e.g. blog posts, and see links between papers and blog posts written by same author.

Martin mentioning ‘DataCite’ for citing datasets – we will hear more about this later today from Kevin Ashley I expect.

Finally Martin saying – references now appear everywhere – published on the web – need ways of finding them and capturing them. Also look at ways of assessing ‘importance’ – e.g. citation counts is traditional way of doing this. Now PLoS looks at page views and pdf downloads as well as citation counts – what they are calling ‘article level metrics’ – while this is a common concept in social media, it isn’t commonplace in scientific literature.

Also, not just about metrics but quality. Services like ‘Research Blogging’ and ‘Faculty 1000’. Twitter also growing in usage – can be a good way of discovering references, but how to get into your reference manager (I’ll mention something about this later today in my session)