Reliance of Scientific Publication on Citation Management Software: The New Generation

great deal of critical and creative thinking is needed for authoring a good paper. Nevertheless, there is a simple task during manuscript preparation, namely reference listing, which, although needs no intelligence, it can seem extremely tedious and time-consuming to authors. Apart from the impact of computers on many aspects of research, they can be a dream tool for dealing with repetitious, dull, yet precise tasks, including bibliography management. Computer software can fetch accurate citation data from the official websites, insert them into a database without errors, and allow for their batch-editing as required. One such commercially available application is “EndNote” and a free alternative to that is “Zotero”, a worthwhile new-generation bibliography management software. Zotero (available at http://www.zotero.org) is a free open-source cross-platform citation manager that can be used to “collect, organize, cite, and share” research resources. It easily captures available bibliographic information with minimal mouse clicks as single citations or bundles of multiple references while browsing a website containing an article or relevant information. There is a large and still growing number of websites supported by Zotero including Web of Science, PubMed, PubMed Central, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, Google Books, Wikipedia, Amazon, and many other websites of renowned publishers which hold publication data such as DOI, ISBN, or PMID. Unlike other programs of its kind, Zotero is extremely fast in fetching data, compatible with virtually all operating systems, and very simple to learn. Zotero only requires Mozilla Firefox (a free web browser) and supports free and commercial word processor programs, many of which are not supported by other similar software. Moreover, its ability to export bibliographic data into EndNote (RIS) format is another advantage. A researcher who is familiar with EndNote can still utilize Zotero to capture citations, and then feed them into EndNote for further procedures. Mendeley (available at http://www.mendeley.com) has recently developed a similar feature; however, using Zotero seems to be much more convenient. A brief comparison is given in Table 1, with detailed comparisons available on the Internet (e.g., the comparison on Wikipedia). When it comes to managing the citations in a word processor program, however, EndNote has the upper hand. Unlike almost all other citation managers, EndNote can automatically merge citation fields when being put together, or is able to insert new citations right into the field of an existing citation. These features are extremely handy when working with a lot of references, as users can simply put two or more citations together, and let EndNote convert them to a single citation field, a feature not available in the current version of Zotero, but requested from developers by the author. Also, EndNote can be programmed to use one of different journal title abbreviations, while Zotero is limited to be fed only by the citation file. Besides, EndNote has a graphical user interface for editing citation styles, while the current A