Stephanie Marshall & Bronwyn Tarrier
Bibliographic Software Specialists

The latest version of one of the world’s most popular bibliographic tools, Reference Manager 11, has just been released. It makes sharing research information with colleagues and co-authors easy, thanks to some powerful new collaborative features.

It's a funny thing with a certain type of software tool. You find what seems like a useful, time-saving utility. Before long it becomes essential to your way of working. If the developers know what they're doing, its capabilities grow - and you find it's taken its place at the very hub of your working day.

Reference Manager is a good example. Essentially, it's a tool to help you locate relevant literature references from the huge range of online databases available these days. It lets you store and manage these in your own reference databases, and retrieve those you need to cite in your own papers. When you do, it formats them automatically to the style of the publication or organisation you're writing for - and creates a bibliography while you write.

What makes Reference Manager so central to your work is that everything associated with a reference is organised in your Reference Manager database. You can link your reference collections to full-text articles, PDF files, Web pages and image files on the Internet or any accessible hard drive, so that all your research is instantly accessible from one place.

Few of us work in isolation, and Reference Manager is an ideal environment for sharing your research with colleagues. As well as allowing you to share reference databases held on a local server, the brand-new version 11 adds many new tools for collaborative work.

For example, Reference Manager 11 stores all cited reference data in your Word document into what's called a 'travelling library'. So when a colleague opens the file, all the bibliographic data is there, part and parcel of the paper, properly formatted and numbered and responsive to all the edits your colleague makes using Reference Manager. That's especially great if you co-author.

New Reference Manager 11 offers another innovative way of sharing your bibliographic information: through the Internet. It includes a built in Web publishing tool that allows you to post up to 15 different reference databases to a Web site or intranet, in seconds. You can control who has access to your work by specifying a user name and password; and if you wish, you can set permissions for others to add to and edit your references as well as view, search and export.

Reference Manager 11 is full of other connectivity tools too. You can import and export files in XML format to use with other applications. You can exchange data with the new RefViz visual data analysis tool (see panel on the right). And you can locate full text faster by connecting to your institution’s online resources using OpenURL standards.

Before we finish, we must mention another great new feature of Reference Manager 11 - subject bibliographies. You can sub-divide your bibliography by subject headings, by author or any other field or fields in your reference database. This opens up a whole range of new possibilities. For example, you can create reading lists by topic. Or you can produce curricula vitae listing the publications of every member of your workgroup or department. Or if you're writing a book, you can divide your bibliography by chapter.

There's a new Network Version of Reference Manager 11 too, which centralises access to databases and content files and provides a cost-effective way of making this essential software available to a whole department or organisation.