JUDY MATTHEWS

We have come a long way, fortunately, since the days when 'bibliographic citation management' amounted to anxious graduate students shuffling decks of grubby index cards. In the early 1980s, pioneering PC-based products such as SciMate and ProCite began to liberate students, researchers and librarians from the enormous amount of drudgery entailed in the tedious process of creating and manipulating bibliographies. As miraculous as they seemed nearly two decades ago, however, those early software packages are clunky dinosaurs in comparison with today's products. Importing and exporting functions have been vastly improved and streamlined, expanding the universe of databases from which users can now quickly capture, manipulate and print citations in an extensive variety of formats. Most users are delighted with the extent to which today's software anticipates and handles the many wearisome details of citation formatting and database management. Further, most citation management products now offer cross-platform compatibility. They are also responding to the Web publishing revolution, providing the capability to export citations in HTML format and thus enabling users to make an almost seamless transition to Web documents.

Librarians have long made use of bibliographic citation management programs and used them to organize the results of commercial database searches, usually conducted for users for a fee. In the past several years, however, we have entered a new era of availability of databases for direct use by students, researchers and the public. Memories of the days of scheduling an appointment with a librarian to perform a negotiated search are fading fast as users perform their own searches. As a result, many librarians now find themselves spending an ever-increasing amount of time on training, not simply in teaching users how to search databases, but in helping this growing population of end-users to manage their search results with bibliographic software packages. Librarians expect that future improvements in the features and capabilities of these products will parallel the needs and expectations of this growing customer base.

Eight bibliographic software packages are reviewed here briefly, the result of a team effort by six librarians at Michigan State University. Most products were reviewed individually; one was reviewed jointly. Reviewers discussed their reviews with the team coordinator, who also provided this introduction.

The software packages reviewed here are Bibliographica 6.5, Bookends Plus 5, Bookwhere? 2000 3.0 (beta), Citation 7.0, EndNote 3.0.1, Papyrus 7.0, ProCite 4.03 and Reference Manager 9.0 (beta). Although review emphasis was placed on Windows versions, all versions (Microsoft Windows, Macintosh or MS-DOS) were examined along with any downloadable Web versions. There was no response to requests for review copies of GetaRef and Library Master, so reviews of those products are not included here. Most of the packages reviewed here are Windows-based. Two anomalies are Bookends Plus and Papyrus. Bookends Plus is available for Macintosh only, by download from the Web. Papyrus is available only in MS-DOS and Macintosh versions (the release of a new full Windows version of Papyrus, based on the Macintosh version, is expected in 1999). Unless otherwise noted, prices listed are standard US single-user prices current at the time of writing.

Reviewing software products is similar to shooting at a moving target. Announcements of new product versions for a variety of platforms seem to appear almost overnight. In addition, news that one company has acquired another and absorbed its product line seems ubiquitous in the software industry. During the course of this review project, for example, ISI (the Institute for Scientific Information) announced the acquisition of Niles Software, Inc., which developed EndNote citation software. Niles Software and another subsidiary of ISI, Research Information Systems, have now merged to form ResearchSoft. ISI therefore is now the parent company of three of the products reviewed here: EndNote, ProCite and Reference Manager.

Click here for a summary of features table.

• Bibliographica 6.5
  Leslie Behm
• Bookends Plus 5
  Demetrios Ioannides
• Bookwhere? 2000 3.0 (beta)
  Michael Lorenzen
• Citation 7.0
  Tom Volkening
  
• EndNote 3.0.1
  Michael Simmons
  
• Papyrus 7.0
  Leslie Behm & Judy Matthews
• ProCite 4.03
  Demetrios Ioannides
• Reference Manager 9.0 (beta)
  Demetrios Ioannides