During my MLIS, I remember the relief of discovering Endnote after spending several hours checking the position of commas and full stops in my references. Absolute magic in pulling my citations into the appropriate places in each paper! It was probably the best way to appreciate the value of reference management software, and it still pays to use knowledge of the target citation style to inspect the output for quality.
Since then, Endnote has gained an online version, which seems a little weaker to me in terms of managing the fields, but I have used it for sharing references.
I now have Zotero and find that the requirement for Firefox is a bit limiting. I've not yet experimented with Mendeley, am aware it does not have all citation styles that might be needed, although they can be edited. citeulike has a different use - for sharing references with colleagues.
To help researchers manage their references, I think libraries should offer information about these free tools rather than limiting information to those, such as Endnote, that are supplied by the institution.
Zotero does now exist as a standalone that integrates with Chrome and Safari (and, I understand, soon with IE and Opera(!))
ReplyDeletehttp://www.zotero.org/blog/announcing-zotero-3-0-beta-release/
Mendeley has the same selection of styles as Zotero - which at this time are more than 400 different styles, covering more than 1600 journals and institutions.