Europe PMC has released new export format options, indicated in the image below: The RIS export format is typically used by Reference Manager and EndNote bibliographic applications for example, so you can now easily import Europe PMC citations. You can also email citations to yourself, or others, by selecting this destination option from the Export menu and filling in the required address fields.

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. UKPMC is now “Zotero enabled”, which means that users can store the bibliographic details of any UKPMC article directly into their Zotero Library.

Because I am preparing this paper from PLOS ONE, with its stupid numbered-references system, I am finally getting to grips with a reference-management system. Specifically, Zotero, which is both free and open source, which means it can’t be taken over by Elsevier. As a complete Zotero n00b, I’ve run into a few issues that more experienced users will no doubt find laughable. Here are two of them.

Last week the first public beta (version 0.5) of Paperpile was released (available for Mac and Linux). Paperpile is a desktop reference manager with typical features: search in PubMed, Google Scholar or ArXiv, import PDF files, support for BibTex and other standard file formates, etc. Paperpile currently doesn’t sync with a web-based version, and Paperpile doesn’t insert citations into manuscripts.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of the reference manager Papers – three years ago we even had a poetry contest when the iPhone version was first released. The strength of Papers has always been the very nice user interface, and Papers 2 released last March was a major update that added many more reference types, collaboration and a word processor plugin.

In March 2009 I posted an overview chart of how popular reference managers have implemented some important features. I’ve since updated this chart several times, and the chart probably has outgrown the format of a blog post.

The reference management software Papers has been a regular topic on this blog.

Today, Digital Science announced an investment in startup Labtiva. And Labtiva released a “community preview” of their reference manager ReadCube. The community preview is a free download for Windows and Mac, and this is the summary of my first impressions. You could write two different reviews about ReadCube. The first version would mention the really slick interface, and the fun you have using the program.

Next month I will participate in the Innovations in Reference Management event organized by Owen Stevens from the Open University.

Reference managers are essential tools to read and write scholarly papers. In the last few years we have seen both a number of new reference managers (most of them web-based), but also a trend for the established reference managers to gain social networking features. More choice is great, but it also creates confusion about the right tool to use.