Review: Bibliography Management Software
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009This weekend, I prepared a survey paper for a Japanese Symposium (which, incidentally, will become the basis of the bibliography chapter of my thesis :-P). I decided that it would be a great opportunity to leave the stone age and start using some bibliography management software. Following suggestions from friends, I tried out Mendeley, Zotero and Jabref - these are my impressions:
Mendeley is developed by some people from last.fm and skype. It has many very sexy features, including the ability to drag a PDF into it, which will create a new entry and pre-fill it with information gathered from the PDF. Mendeley can also update an entry’s fields by searching for its title on the web (google scholar), and the accuracy for this one is very good. The interface was clean and very intuitive - I could easily find all functions that I needed to without having to think/click too much about it, specially the addition of tags/comments to and article.
But (unfortunately, there is always a big But), Mendeley had some pretty big problems. The first one is that it would crash too often - After adding just a dozen or so entries, I would find the desktop application crashing without notice - and worse yet, without error messages or memory dumps that would help me track the problem down. In one of these crashes I lost my entire database (fortunately I was just trying the program at the time, no real data was lost). A secondary problem was that the search function was a bit buggy - If I added a keyword, say, finance, to 6 papers, searching for this keyword would only return 3 or 4 of them.
I hope that they fix those bugs eventually, but until they do, Mendeley is unusable for me 
Zotero is a firefox add-on that also claims to be able to search for paper details on the net. This is already one letdown (at least for me) - I want a standalone program, not something riding on a Firefox instance (specially because Firefox is SUCH a memory hog!). Zotero won’t even reside inside a tab, it must occupy the root screen of FF. Also, because it is an add-on, its data (including stored pdfs) is saved in a bizarre location inside the hidden mozilla folder - it would be cool if this was configurable, since it would make things easier to back up. These aside, it had many of the same features that I liked in Mendeley, like searching for paper information on the web, and getting info from PDF’s - although they were a bit clunkier to use - for instance, if Zotero couldn’t find the info from a PDF you dragged into it, you couldn’t just enter the info yourself in the entry, you had to create a new one, and drag the pdf into it. They also had a cool feature to link entries as “related” between themselves.
However, all of the above is pointless when Zotero simply chocked on my bibfile. Not sure if it was FF or Zotero’s fault, but trying to import my references file into Zotero would result in FF locking. Next.
Jabref is a java based bib management software. After installation, it read my bibliography file immediately, without glitches. The program was stable, with powerful options to select/search/group papers. However, the interface was very obscure - it took me a while to find the button I had to click to edit an entry (couldn’t just double click it), and there is no option to add tags (I can add keywords to a field and text-search it, but it is just not as easily automateable). Jabref can only search on IEEExplore, and can’t read PDF metadata (it can, interestingly enough, WRITE pdf metadata though - I wonder what is the point of it).
Anyway, after playing with it for about one hour or so, I got the hang of where most of the functions are. It could really use a “search the net for details of this paper” function that searched more than IEEExplore, or a “read PDF metadata function” for convenience of use, but other than that, jabref is functional enough to last me until the other options get their act together.
