toxportal

Despite my initial enthusiasm for Connotea (see below) I quickly found that, whilst various popular import and export formats are supported, it does not allow you to export as .rtf reference list. This is a function that I’m sure most researchers would like, as a way to save on the drudgery of typing-in all those citations, nicely formatted.

I can see all you endnote users smiling smugly right now. But not everyone want to pay $299 for a reference manager

With so many resourceful and generous open-source developers out there, a quick scan of Sourceforge revealed JabRef, a free Java-based reference manager with some very nice features, including a solution for the aforementioned formatting malaise, and the ability to import/export in other popular formats. Regular expressions are supported!

JabRef works perfectly at home, but there is no access to Medline through the proxy server at work (!?). So, Connotea stays in my favourites list for now, feeding JabRef with all that information.

Another score for efficiency and a tip of the hat to the Open Source community.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under Tools, Datasets.