Collaborative Reference Management System

Citation has always been a crucial part of research when it comes to accreditation for intellectual property. The maintenance of these references has mostly been the sole responsibility of the author to collect, maintain and format. There are tools to assist in this regard, both commercial and open source with varying degrees of support for user specific needs, yet it became apparent that a gap emerged between these utilities; there were no real support for collaborative reference sharing or maintenance. To address this problem a prototype collaborative reference management system was designed. This paper indicates the methodology used to implement this prototype as well as the lessons learned during the development of the system. It also identifies two possible research questions that might be worth investigating in future research.