I’ve been an avid user of Zotero for a couple of years now and I’ve come to to really like the program with all its features. It’s helped me considerably compiling reference lists and going back to them when needed. The other day I gave a tutorial on research methods and, beforehand, I asked myself how many of our postgraduate students would be familiar with Zotero the like. It turned out that many of them weren’t. However, the possibilities reference managers offer seemed appealing to a lot of them and I’ve now had the first feedback from students trying different tools. The day before the tutorial I posted a question on Twitter and was pointed to an overview of reference managers by William Gunn, Mendeley‘s Community Manager. The overview was compiled by Martin Fenner, a medical doctor and cancer researcher at the Hannover Medical School. I’m planning to host another meeting with the same students at the end of the semester in order to see what value they have derived from the tools and how they’ve used them. I’ll keep you posted.
via blogs.plos.org