The RefWorks Webinar schedule for September 2009 is now available. Webinars available to users are:

1)    RefWorks Fundamentals (60 minutes)

2)    RefWorks Advanced Functions (60 minutes)

3)    RefWorks Administration Functions (75 minutes)

4)    RefShare (60 minutes)

5)    RefWorks in 15 minutes (30 minutes)

6)    RefAware (50 minutes)

7)    The Six ways to Import Information into RefWorks (60 minutes)

8)    Four Ways to Create Bibliographies in RW (60 minutes)

Finally, a couple of webinars on the latest version of:

9)   RefGrab-It (30 minutes): our tool that works with your browser to capture bibliographic information from web pages, giving you the option to import that data into your RefWorks account.

10)  RefMobile (20 minutes): our new mobile interface that enables researchers to use RefWorks via web-enabled mobile phones, smart phones, and personal data assistants (PDAs).

They are continuing to offer sessions in German and in Spanish as well as English. 

Please note: registration is limited to 50 people per class and enrollment is required. Please visit the RefWorks website www.refworks.com to enroll.

Emergency Medicine Journal 2009 (Vol. 26, No. content page

Fade Fave: Is referral to emergency care practitioners by general practitioners in-hours effective?

Fade Skinny: This study looks at evaluating the cost effectiveness to primary care trusts (PCT) in commissioning general practitioner (GP) referrals in-hours to emergency care practitioners (ECP). A retrospective case note review for patients referred by GPs in-hours to ECP over a 4-month period to ascertain any added value over a GP visit was carried out. In a 4-month period 105 patients were referred. In most cases (90.5%) the ECP was utilised as a substitute for a GP rather than providing any additional skills. Defining an avoided attendance as the ECP undertaking an intervention outside a GP skill set this equated to a 9.5% avoided attendance rate compared with the ECP service standard rate of 60%. This has implications both in terms of financial benefit and ongoing ECP service sustainability.

(NHS Athens is required to access this article online)

A brief and unscientific survey of social bookmarking buttons provided by journal websites. Take with pinch of salt and/or tongue in cheek.

PLoS get it. As you'd expect.	BMC get it too.	Even ACS kind of get it.
OUP get it to a degree.	Someone doesn't get it.

I know, all bookmarking services provide their own tools, such as bookmarklets. However, I suspect that a button is more convenient for many people: it’s a courtesy and an advertisement for social bookmarking and online reference management tools.

So NPG: is it “we promote sharing” or “we promote sharing so long as you use our service?”

I have just started using Zotero’s groups feature that allows you to share a set of references with other users. This feature is really great, and it works seamlessly with the Zotero plugin. It occurs to me that this must be a great tool for teachers wishing to share references with students, as well as project groups like the one I work in.

My current bugbear is that it isn’t possible to copy a folder over into the group library from my library, just as well that I’m a belt ad braces type who tags everything in addition to creating indecipherable folder structures.

On my travels on the Zotero webpage, I came across a list of registered users broken down by research interests. The interesting thing to note is that Zotero is now used in many fields. These numbers represent the optional choice of registering a field of interest when a Zotero account is created. Note that this means that a single person may be registered multiple times or not at all (Zotero does not require users to have an account to use the software).

Again, Zotero really is the best reference tool — if you’re not locked in, you’re not locked out. (And thank goodness for BibTeX support!)

Lately I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It’s a really interesting book, and one that I would thoroughly recommend if you’re interested in this kind of thing. Something in Chapter 11 (Promise, Tool, Bargain) struck me because it resonated with an experience I had this week (emphasis added).

Single user tools, from word-processing software to Tetris, have a simple message for the potential user. If you use this, you will find it satisfying or effective or both. With social tools, the group is the user, so you need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective but that others will find it so as well; no matter how appealing the promise, there’s no point being the only user of a social tool. As a result, users of social tools are making two related judgments: Will I like using this tool or participating in this group? Will enough other people feel as I do to make it take off.

The larger the number of users required, the harder the group is to get going, because the potential users will (rightly) be more skeptical that enough users will join to make it worth their while. (An empty restaurant has the same catch-22 in attracting diners.) There are several strategies for handling this problem. The most obvious one is to make joining easy, in order to make the promise seem within reach. Kate Hanni’s Flyers Rights group made the basic action (signing the petition) quite simple and reserved more complicated actions (like calling Congress or talking to the media) for more committed members. Other strategies include creating personal value for the individual users, allowing the social value to manifest only later. Joshua  Schachter’s service for bookmarking and tagging webpages, called del.icio.us, serves as a persona archive of webpages; the value that accrues from aggregating the group’s view of the Web is optional for any given user, but enough people have taken advantage of that value to cause the service to grow dramatically.

I was at the MCETECH conference at Carleton this week (I hate going to Carleton, so remote, other than that the conference was really good though) and there was a workshop on Zotero. The workshop was so good that during it, I switched browsers to Firefox (my but I’m going to miss Safari), downloaded the plug-in, and got started.

Now I should probably mention at this point that I’ve been needing to get something to organize my references for a while. I’m reading a lot at the moment and although better than index cards (I hope) half a dozen spreadsheets and a word document is not the best way to go. Last week, I went to a day of talks for graduate students (of varying usefulness) and one of the talks was on RefWorks. RefWorks also looks pretty good, but it’s proprietary. So whilst it’s free over the course of my time at university, once I leave I face loosing all my references, paying for it, or solving the same problem again. Zotero also makes it easy to cite webpages and news articles, and for those that it doesn’t accept already I can write my own “translator” so it seems more versatile and extensible. I’ve also tried EndNote, which was OK but the big pain there is getting in all the information for the paper or whatever it is you’re citing, so if there’s something that makes that easier… I want it. (I was then using the desktop version, I understand there’s now a Web version but I haven’t tried it).

So Zotero, is free, open source, extensible, easy to use, and does everything I want it to do. Sold. That’s what I’ll be using. And I’m twittering about @Zotero, and #mcetech (incidentally, I hate it that Twitter doesn’t actually delete posts you delete – it just removes them from your profile, typos grr), of course. I’m a twitter junkie – that’s what I do now.

And… I get an @kittenthebad tweet from someone who’s suggesting I use Mendeley. Which I’d heard of before but had just written off as *yawn* yet another social network. Nice idea, but ultimately just a procrastination tool, so being ever-diplomatic, I say: “Looked at mendeley ages ago but thought it just for procrastinating. Like @zotero ‘cos social stuff byproduct of great+useful ap.“. And the guy responds, “I’d recommend you have a better look. There have been many updates. And it’s absolutely not for procrastination hehe “. K, fine. And I do. And perhaps it could do everything that I want but the big thing they’re selling is this social aspect. Which is nice, an’ all, but not enough to convince me to go to the effort of putting in a load of data and giving it a go. Zotero are bringing in a lot of social stuff (next couple of weeks, I was told) so when I was telling supervisor about the talk (he hadn’t been able to make it) I was telling him how he will be able to create a group for the course he teaches etc, and that’s awesome. But first and foremost? It’s a great and versatile reference tool which – get this – will even work with your Google doc (maybe you’re not impressed, but I thought that was pretty awesome). Most of the social aspect I need is that I can make my library visible and my supervisor can see what I’m reading (you can see it too, if you like, it’s here)

Finally we come back to the text highlighted in bold way back up there. Because both Mendeley and Zotero will eventually have similar products that do similar things and have a social / sharing aspect on top of that. But at this point in time, Zotero’s product definitely creates that personal value for me. And if the social value manefests later, well that’s great. If it doesn’t, well that’s OK too – I can do everything I want already. It would be wonderful if it came up with recommendations for me (as it should very soon), but would I bother logging everything I read just to get those recommendations? No.

On a side note, Zotero is funded by the Centre for History and New Media. They will soon charge for storage (so you can back up the stuff you’ve been reading online), but the cost will be nominal. Mendeley is a business with funding and will eventually need to turn a profit. I’m not going to speculate as to what that means for your data (on their website FAQ they promise that what’s currently free will remain so) but it is a consideration – for me at least.

Those of you on the bleeding edge of reference management technology will know all about Connotea.  It lives on your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, ready to spring into action whenever you come across a reference or website on the interweb you would like to save for later. You could think of it as a somewhat geeky social networking tool–you upload citations of interest and tag them, others do the same.  You show them yours, and they show you theirs!  Unless you mark yours as private, that is.

It is nice that it is free, but not so nice that you have to add each reference separately, you cannot, say, go to a bibliography page of a study (in a pearl growing attempt) and add them all in one batch.  It is also great that it talks to Reference manager, Endnote, Word (it sends an .xml file that can be made into a bibliography), etc.  This little gadget could make grey literature searching a whiz–or at least take the cut-and-paste drudgery out of it.

Oh, and no abstracts are included, if they are available. Another big caveat, but it should be easily solved by adding that functionality (hint, hint).

Of course, I am not the first to check out Connotea and it has been blogged on here , here and here.

Just a quick list (doncha love ‘em?) about Zotero:

1. It’s free and open source
2. It does more or less what every other reference management tool does as well, or better
3. It’s where I work (in the web browser)
4. It works on my Linux machine, my Mac laptop and the Windows machine at the help desk
5. I can work with the same references from multiple computers without having to think about it
6. I can save webpages as is, and annotate them
7. Getting references into my documents works, irrespective of whether I’m using L^AT_EX, Google Docs, OpenOffice, Microsoft Word…

There are a number of EndNote and Reference Manager training sessions available this year.

Reference Management software allows you to manage the references you need for your assignments and add citations and reference lists into your work.

To find out more and to book a session go to the Library website.

There are a number of EndNote and Reference Manager training sessions available this year.

Reference Management software allows you to manage the references you need for your assignments and add citations and reference lists into your work.

To find out more and to book a session go to the Library website.

Learn the basics of EndNote. This demonstration could include creating a list of references in Endnote, downloading records from online databases such as PubMed, creating a bibliography, or adding citations to a paper using Endnote and Microsoft Word. The last 15 minutes is reserved for in-depth questions.

The Dana Medical Library offers training, troubleshooting and support in EndNote. For more information, contact the Dana Reference Desk at danaref@uvm.edu or 656-2201.

Some pages removed:

“Damn you censorship!” they cry

Ref-man? Principles!

Thomson Reuters have sued the creators of Zotero. In fact, this is so despicable that I recommend that all users migrate immediately to Zotero/Bibus.

Goodbye Endnote, you won’t be missed.

‘Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free’ – Linus Torvalds

Ratings

Dashes mean not yet rated; “ni” means not listed on site. Average ratings across mu and vt were 4.55, 4.4, 2.1, 3.95 and 4.45 for BibDesk, Bookends, EndNote, Papers and Sente respectively. Meanwhile, PDF manager Yep is quite popular. Data is from sometime this week.

Popularity

For iPapers2/iPapers, the iusethis users of iPapers and iPapers2 were combined.

L^AT_EX er et dokumentforberedelsesprogram som brukes til å utforme dokumenter opp på T_EX oppsettingsprogrammet. Programmet brukes innen flere fag (som f.eks, lingvistikk og matematikk) for å produsere dokumenter som har komplekse layout-er og tegnsetting.

Få tak i L^AT_EX

Linux — Se din distribusjons programvarekilder, eller ta evt. kontakt med NTNU IT/Orakeltjenesten.

Mac — MacTeX

Windows — proTeXt

Generelle lenker

L^AT_EX project — generelle opplysninger om L^AT_EX

T_EX users group — kilde for alt som har med T_EX-systemet å gjøre

Dokumentasjon

Standard dokumentasjon — På engelsk

Annet på norsk

Annet på engelsk

L^AT_EX for nybegynnere

BibTeX – kursnotater

Få hjelp

T_EX-FAQ — på engelsk

no.it.programvare.tex — norskspråklig usenetgruppe

comp.text.tex — engelskspråklig usenetgruppe

Andre kilder

L^AT_EX ved NTNU (pluss noe gummi!)

USIT ved UiOs L^AT_EX sider

It’s common knowledge that Word 2008 on Mac OS X is not compatible with the CWYW plugin for any version of Endnote. It’s less well known that this problem is due to lack of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) support in Microsoft Word 2008.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for Mac users however, as Erik Schwiebert, Software Design Lead at Microsoft Corporation, Macintosh Business Unit informs us that the next version of Office for Mac will include VBA; note that this may take some time, until then he recommends the following:

So, if you have a dire need for Visual Basic, you can continue to run Mac Office 2004 (it will even run side-by-side with Office 2008 ) and we’re publicly committing to VB as good (maybe even better, if things go well) in the next version.

Schwieb

How can I import existing data bases into “scholarz.net”? How can I import bibliographical data when creating a source? When will it be possible to do a BibTex import?

These were the users’ most frequent questions last week. I have good news for you:

Just upload your data in BibTex format and choose whether you want to import single sources or whole libraries.

This function is not only interesting for BibTex users. Endnote users can export their data in BibTex format and thus import it into “scholarz.net”. (A direct import from Endnote is being developed). There are also many websites and online catalogues that offer BibTex export. You can import all this information with just a click and thus save much time you would have to spend on entering bibliographical data.

Another nice feature is the import via ISBN or source title:

If you are creating a source and have this information ready you can just import all the data automatically. But the best feature is not online yet: I was able to test it today: an “add to scholarz” bookmarklet.

This is a function that will enable you to extract bibliographical data from websites to create new sources. If you have found an interesting source on the internet you’ll just have to click on a button in your bookmark list and scholarz will automatically create a new source with all bibliographical data.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

In a series of posts we’d like to introduce our concept throughout the next week. Today we start with a short overview:

“scholarz.net” is an online software containing the following elements:

reference management, knowledge management, social knowledge and a research network

“How can I make my research more efficient? How can I bring the best out of my knowledge and my ideas? How can I prevent data chaos, share my information with others and network with other colleagues?” These questions arise at the beginning of a dissertation, and they are also the point from which the development of “scholarz.net” has started.

Our concept is focused on the individual scholar. Someone who wants to optimize the accessability of his research data. Someone that wants to gather sources, quotations and information to turn them into new exciting results. That’s why the core of “scholarz.net” will be a completely new way of managing your knowledge.

Normally researchers are not suffering from authism – they want to cooperate with colleagues, work together and share knowledge. This will be much easier with the “social knowledge” function of “scholarz.net”. Data stored in your library can easily be shared with certain users or everyone around the globe. Moreover, it will be possible to search the public data of other users to find even more interesting information.

Networking is another important thing nowadays. But our “reseach network” won’t be a simple social network like those you can find all around the internet. The connection of a user profile with the possibility to share data will enable you to find colleagues, share data with them and even to work on the same document at the same time.

As “scholarz.net” is an online software, it will be accessable from every computer around the globe. You’ll have your knowledge ready wherever you are! Thumb drives will be dispensable. But the most important thing is: your data will be stored, backuped and protected on our server. A head crash or a computer virus won’t be able to harm your data any more. Of course, it will stille be possible to download your data to your computer’s hard disk.

Our software is in private beta at the moment. It is already running, but we still want to run a few tests before opening it to the public. We’re already working with it – and we’re amazed. It has improved the quality of our research significantly.