Reference management software preferences among liberal arts faculty

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this study was to determine faculty preferences and attitudes regarding reference management software (RMS) to improve the library's support and training programs. Design/methodology/approach-A short, online survey was emailed to approximately 272 faculty. Findings-Survey results indicated that multiple RMS were in use, with faculty preferring Zotero over the library-supported RefWorks. More than 40 per cent did not use any RMS. Research limitations/implications-The relatively short length of the survey precluded a more detailed investigation of faculty attitudes. The 20 per cent response rate, although typical of surveys of this type, may over-represent those faculty who have strong attitudes toward RMS. These findings support the necessity of doing more research to establish the parameters of the RMS environment among faculty, with implications for support, instruction and outreach at the institutional level. Practical implications-Surveys should be conducted to establish local faculty RMS usage and preferences, as they may differ from both published findings and local expectations. Because it is unlikely that faculty will overwhelmingly use one RMS, libraries should plan to support multiple RMS. Originality/value-This study is among the first to investigate the issue of RMS faculty preferences in a liberal arts setting.

Graduate Student Use and Non-use of Reference and PDF Management Software: An Exploratory Study

“…Some other researchers looked at the use of RMS to store and/or annotate PDFs (Emanuel, 2013;Francese, 2012Francese, , 2013Melles & Unsworth, 2015), but they did not investigate the interest of some of the new features like syncing to mobile devices, the use of a watch folder or renaming of files. Lonergan (2017) found that annotating and highlighting uploaded documents were not that important to liberal arts faculty that were surveyed.…”

Kuwait University Faculty Usage and Perspectives of Reference Management Software

“…RMS, on the other hand, enables researchers to store, arrange, output, and share their references. Another RMS definition is by Lonergan "a software that stores citations in a digital form, either on a local computer or via an online interface, to make organizing research and formatting bibliographies and in-text citations more efficient" (p. 2) [5]. Thus, the key functions of RMSs are to create a citation database, with the ability to track and arrange the references, and to format references and citations while writing a document.…”

“…In the United States, Lonergan [5] investigated the preferences and attitudes towards RMSs among the Liberal Arts faculty. Of the respondents, 43% did not use RMSs.…”

“…An online survey was created using Google Forms and adopted Lonergan's [5] questionnaire with slight modifications to better match the purposes of this study. The questions were in both Arabic and English because Arabic is the main language at KU.…”

Evaluating Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall in an institutional repository workflow

“…Even fewer studies examined the importing functions of the software (Table 1) (Basak, 2014a;Basak 2014b;Gilmour & Cobus-Kuo, 2011;Homol, 2014;Sergiadis, 2018a;Sergiadis, 2018b). Importing is an essential function for IR managers as well as users collecting and organizing their research (Emanuel, 2013;Francese, 2013;Lisbon, 2018;Lonergan, 2017;Madhusudhan, 2016;Melles & Unsworth, 2015;Nariani, 2016;Nilashi, Ibrahim, Sohaei, Ahmadi, & Almaee, 2016). Studies that imported citations in order to compare RMS had mixed results on which one performed the best, but all concluded that no RMS is perfect (Basak, 2014a;Basak 2014b;Gilmour & Cobus-Kuo, 2011;Homol, 2014).…”