Speaker 1: and i am finished But did you put in those references? Hi, my name is Fleur and I'm a PhD student from the Netherlands. And today we are talking about reference managers. What is it and why do you need one? There are three main programs that basically everyone is using. And those are EndNote, Mendeley and Sotero. I'm reviewing these three reference managers on specific points and I put timestamps on it and you can find it next to here. And let's just get started. Okay, why do you need a reference manager? Well, you saw the intro clip, if you have written a whole manuscript and you need to put in the references afterwards, it's such a hassle if you have to do it manually. But fortunately, they found something for that. And it's just a tool on the internet or tool on the computer that can help you with this. And it's actually wonderful. But it also tracks your PDFs and your articles that you want to read or that you have read. And it organizes everything for you. So you have all your literature in one place, which is basically a very nice thing to have. So if you're working on a project that takes a longer time, for example, a bachelor thesis, master thesis, or even your PhD thesis, or any project afterwards, you can just use a reference manager and everything will be in one place and everything is where you need it to be. There are several different programs that let you put in those references and that you can use it as a citation tool with plugins in Word or plugins in Google Docs or whatever you are using. I'm reviewing three reference managers, EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero on specific points. And let's just get started with the first one, which is money. So the main argument is that EndNote costs money and Mendeley and Zotero are free. But it is a little bit more complicated than that. For example, many institutions have a license to EndNote. So EndNote might be free for you as well, just like Mendeley and Zotero. So let's look at the prices. EndNote costs $302.44. It's a one-time purchase and you get unlimited storage for all your PDFs and references. And they have a student discount, which makes it $140.33 with a one-time purchase as well. So Mendeley and Zotero are free from the beginning. You can upgrade the storage as you go. So Mendeley has a free storage for two gigabytes. And if you want more, you can purchase more storage, which is a subscription. So you pay the money every year. And Zotero has the same system, but the free version only has 300 megabytes as free storage for you. So if you want to have the two gigabytes that Mendeley is already offering for free, then you should pay $20 a year for that. I put up the prices over here so you can check them out and you can compare them. And I want to note that EndNote has a one-time purchase and Mendeley and Zotero have a subscription-based business model. So if you have a lot of storage, it might be best to go for EndNote. All right, let's go to the second point. The second point is organization. How do these reference managers actually manage your references? And they basically do it all in the same way. It's just a list of all your papers and when you click on one, you can see the metadata for that one. That means you can see the year, the authors, the journal it was published in, et cetera, et cetera. And you can open the PDF, the full text that is linked to that, if you have that. So if you look at EndNote, you can see that there are many references in here and you can just click on them and then you will see all the metadata that is linked to it over here. That's how EndNote looks. This is dark mode, of course. There's also a light mode, but I like the dark mode. For Mendeley, it looks like this. So basically the same thing. You have a list with the authors and names of the papers, the years and the published in. And if you click one, you can see all the data over here, all the metadata you want to know about and you want to see and you can actually change it if it's necessary. I do have some PDFs in Mendeley because I actually use Mendeley. Mendeley is my preferred reference manager. And you can just click on the PDF if it's here, click on it and it will open. That's how Mendeley looks like. And last but definitely not least is Sotero. Sotero is also a list with names and authors and you can add the year, I think it's over here. Yes, here's the year. And again, on the right side, you can see what all the metadata is about and you can go to the PDF if there is a PDF linked by just clicking on it like this and it will open in a separate window. So that's how Antenode, Mendeley and Sotero look. With regards to organization, every program has also a folder structure. So on the left you can see the folders that I have created and some basic folders that Sotero has created. And you can see for Mendeley it's the same thing. The same goes for Antenode. There are also some groups over here and you can put the reference in there to categorize them. One thing that Antenode has and Mendeley and Sotero lack is customization for your columns. So you can customize what you want up here and Mendeley and Sotero can do that as well. But you can actually create a column that is a custom column. So if I press over here with my control key on title, for example, you can see here custom 128. And you can use that, for example, when you're writing a systematic review and you are screening papers, you can put in the name of yourself versus the name of the other screener. I actually use this for my own systematic review and I can tell you that's quite useful to remember who picked what paper. Okay, let's talk about the next point, which is annotation and note-taking. So if we look at Antenode and I actually found a reference with a PDF on it, you can see the PDF on the right. And if you click this button, it will open up and you can annotate and make notes on this one. I already highlighted this. So you just select, let's say we select this one and we just highlight it like this. You can also underline it and you can also make sticky notes. So let's say you want to make a sticky note about this piece, then you can just press this one. And when you double click, it says this, but you can also, this is a sticky note. Add that. And it's quite useful. You can pick all kinds of colors. You can pick all kinds of lines if you want to make a line, et cetera. So that's how Antenode handles annotations. And if you want to make notes, you can do that. If you scroll down and you can see that it says notes of research notes or research notes. And then yes, you can see I made a note already. This is a note and you can just put it in here and it's very basic. In Mandalay, it's a little bit more advanced than note-taking. So if you go to a random paper, you can just go to notes and you can add a note. And there's also some text formatting options over here. And if you double click on a paper, you can also highlight, create a note, just like we said before with Antenode. So those options are the same. And in Sotero, it works the same way. But in Sotero, if you open a PDF, it goes to a third party app. So in this case, Preview. Note-taking in Sotero is a little bit more advanced. You can actually click on this link, go to notes, and you can add a note. And as you can see, the note will appear over here. And if you double click, you can do a lot of word formatting in here. So you can make it bold or you can underline it and all kinds of things. So this is a note and it will save and it will save to the metadata. The same for Antenode in Mandalay. But the cool thing about Sotero is that you can add several notes. So this is the second note. And you can see that they will all appear over here, which is very handy if you want to make different points. And organization-wise, this is a little bit better, I believe, for the organization part. And last but not least, all reference managers have a tag option. So you can just click on tags and you can add tags and as many as you want, which helps for the organization. For example, I have a tag called General Papers. And in those are papers that I basically use for every project, such as the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And I use it almost every project because I'm actually in psychiatry. Okay, let's get to the nitty gritty while we are actually using a reference manager. The citation part. We don't want to manually enter every citation in a project. No, we just want to use a reference manager that does it for us in the right style. So there are different styles for citations. And there are almost 10,000 different styles that you can use for your projects. So Mandalay and Sotero work with the Citation Style Language, the CSL. And this is an open source project that helps to format citations and bibliographies. It has a repository of almost 10,000 citation styles. So the possibilities are endless when you're using CSL, like Mandalay and Sotero. Antnode has its own system for the citations and has almost 6,000 citation styles, which is enough for every project that you need to do. You can also customize styles or add new styles that goes for all three reference managers. You can actually make your own style if you want to, if that's what you're into, which is really cool. In theory, all outputs should be the same. So every reference with the same citation style should look the same. If you're using Mandalay, Sotero, Antnode, it doesn't really matter. However, in practice, it does matter. And there are differences in the outputs you get. And that's mostly due to the metadata that was put in. So it's basically garbage in, garbage out. If you are not putting the right metadata in, your reference manager will not be able to generate the right references in your project. Most of the times, the reference manager can get the metadata from the PDF, but make sure you check that because it's not always correct or some information is missing. It's very important to have the right metadata there for the accuracy of your references in your projects. I've said it before, my preferred reference manager is Mandalay. And the main reason why I love Mandalay is because it has a proper iPad app. So all reference managers are for Windows and for macOS. But not all have an iOS app, which I am using. And I've put the devices it's available on over here. And as you can see, Antnode has an iPad app as well. But I tried it and I didn't like it. And I just prefer Mandalay because it fits my workflow. So I read a lot on my iPad and I'm searching for papers on my iPad. Because I'm just doing that when I'm chilling on the couch and I just want to read something that interests me. And then I find something that I like and I'm like, oh, I need to save this one for when I need it. And Mandalay actually provides me with a tool that I can use to save those references that I find when I'm reading on the couch late at night. So Mandalay fits my workflow perfectly and that's why I use Mandalay. We all want collaborations and we all collaborate with other scientists in other institutions or on different places in the world, which is great. And we want to share references with them, if possible. For example, I did that when I started my PhD project. So my collaborator had this whole list of references that she used for the grant application. And she shared it with me through a group in Mandalay so that I could work on the project in the future and use the same references, which is pretty cool and pretty nice. So I used a group on Mandalay and it can sync all the references that are within this group. Both Antnode and Sotero have similar options. If you found a paper in your browser and you want to add it to your reference manager, there are so-called web importers, which are plugins for your Google Chrome. And these let you add the references to the reference manager you are using. Both Mandalay and Sotero have web importer options. Antnode has a similar thing called connection file, but these connection files let you only connect to one specific library or website. So it's not across all websites you're using. It's not a plugin for Chrome. So now we are talking about plugins. You want plugins for the text formatting program you are using. And all three reference managers work with Microsoft Word. But more and more people are using other text formatting programs these days. One of which is LaTeX, which is mostly used in the beta science, such as physics or computer science. LaTeX has a very good function for formatting formulas, which is great if you're into those beta sciences. But it's not so great for references. So you have to export all your references from your reference manager to BibteX, which is a sort of code for your metadata. And then you have to import those in your LaTeX file again. Antnode, Mandalay and Sotero all export to BibteX, so you can use it if you're working with LaTeX. Another text formatter that's getting more and more attention under academics is Google Docs. It's very nice when you're doing collaborations or when you're working on a study project together or whatever you're doing together. But unfortunately Antnode and Mandalay do not support Google Docs at this moment. Sotero however has a plugin that you can use for Google Docs and that will let you put in the references in the same way as in Word basically. Which is very, very nice if you are using Google Docs for collaborating. So there are some extra functionalities from these reference managers that I did not cover in this video. For example, one of them is searching for papers through the reference manager. This does not work for me because many papers are still not openly accessible and if I'm not using the proxy for my university, I will not be able to get the full text for these papers. So my workflow does not include searching for papers through the reference managers, but I want to let you know that that is an option if you can actually get access to the papers through the reference manager. Now you know everything about reference managers, but what reference manager is good for you? Which one does suit what you need and what you want? Well, I made a little list for you so I can help you with that. For the budgeter, I would advise Mandalay. Both Mandalay and Sotero are free, but Mandalay has more storage for the free option. Budgeter, Mandalay. For the has-it-all, also Mandalay. I can't stress enough how well the integration with multiple devices is with Mandalay. Are you into open source? Get Sotero. It's the open source reference manager you need. The customizer, get EndNote. EndNote has the most functionalities and is best customizable for your needs. And last, the collaborator, get Sotero. It has a Google Docs plugin so you can put all the references in your collaborative Google Docs document. So reference managers, I hope I made clear why you need one and I hope you can actually use this information to find the reference manager that suits your needs. Did you like this video or did you find this video valuable to you? Please let me know in the comments or like this video. 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