Reference Manager

Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software package sold by Thomson Reuters. It was the first commercial software of its kind, originally developed by Ernest Beutler and his son, Earl Beutler, in 1982 through their company Research Information Systems. Offered for the CP/M operating system, it was ported to DOS and then Microsoft Windows and later the Apple Macintosh.

Operation

Reference Manager is most commonly used by people who want to share a central database of references and need to have multiple users adding and editing records at the same time. You can specify whether users are allowed to make edits to the database. Competing packages EndNote and ProCite do not offer this functionality, but Citavi does.

Reference Manager offers different in-text citation templates for each Reference Type. When writing papers, you may want to have a different in-text citation style depending on the reference type you are citing, or journal you are writing for. For example, if you insert a reference for a Book which appears as (Smith, 1999), using Reference Manager you can also insert a reference for a Journal, and it could appear differently, e.g. Smith, 1999 (without the brackets).

Reference Manager allows the use of synonyms within a database. For example, one could specify that "Animal" is a synonym of "Animals", so that in searches for references containing "Animal", references containing "Animals" are also returned.

Reference Manager Web Publisher allows publishing a reference databases to an intranet or internet site. This allows anyone with a web browser to search and download references into their own bibliographic software. Others can even edit the reference information (so that it is wise to password protect the site). Web Publisher includes functionality to interact with SOAP and WSDL standard services.

See also

• Comparison of reference management software

External links

• Reference Manager Email List Archive
• Issues with Word 2007