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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 Citation s (references). Once a citation has been recorded, it can be used time and again in generating Bibliographies , such as lists of references in scholarly books, articles and essays. The development of reference management packages has been driven by the rapid expansion of Scientific Literature .

These software packages normally consist of a Database in which full bibliographic references can be entered, plus a system for generating selective lists or articles in the different formats required by publishers and Learned Journal s. Modern reference management packages can usually be integrated with Word Processor s so that a reference list in the appropriate format is produced automatically as an article is written, reducing the risk that a cited source is not included in the reference list. They will also have a facility for importing the details of publications from Bibliographic Database s.

Reference management software does not do the same job as a bibliographic database, which tries to list all articles published in a particular discipline or group of disciplines; examples are those provided by Ovid Technologies (e.g. Medline ), the Institute For Scientific Information (e.g. Web Of Knowledge ) or monodisciplinary Learned Societies e.g. the American Psychological Association ( PsycINFO ). These databases are large and have to be housed on major Server installations. Reference management software collects a much smaller database, of the publications that have been used or are likely to be used by a particular author or group, and such a database can easily be housed on an individual's Personal Computer .


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