Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software

Reference management software

Reference management software, citation management software or personal bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations . Once a citation has been recorded, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies,...

 package sold by Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters Corporation is a provider of information for the world's businesses and professionals and is created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of Reuters Group on 17 April 2008. Thomson Reuters is headquartered at 3 Times Square, New York City, USA...

. It was the first commercial software of its kind, originally developed by Ernest Beutler

Ernest Beutler

Ernest Beutler was a German-born American hematologist and biomedical scientist. He made important discoveries about the causes of a number of diseases, including anemias, Gaucher disease, disorders of iron metabolism and Tay-Sachs disease...

 and his son, Earl Beutler, in 1982 through their company Research Information Systems. Offered for the CP/M

CP/M

CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...

 operating system, it was ported to DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

 and then Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and later the Apple Macintosh.

Operation

Reference Manager is most commonly used by people who want to share a central database of reference

Reference

Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...

s 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

EndNote

EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is produced by Thomson Reuters.- Features :...

 and ProCite

ProCite

- External links :*...

 do not offer this functionality.

Reference Manager offers different in-text citation

Citation

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source . More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated...

 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

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

, and it could appear differently, e.g. Smith, 1999 (without the brackets).

Reference Manager allows the use of synonym

Synonym

Synonyms are different words with almost identical or similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn and onoma . The words car and automobile are synonyms...

s within a database. For example, one could specify that "Animal

Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...

" 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

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 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

SOAP

SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...

 and WSDL

Web Services Description Language

The Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a Web service. A WSDL description of a web service provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects and what data structures...

standard services.

External links

• Reference Manager Email List Archive
• Issues with Word 2007