New free programs for the management of references

Abstract

Managing and classifying biomedical literature that health professionals store during healthcare, teaching, and research purposes is a huge challenge for them. Reference managers are software that helps scholars to store and organize documents and bibliographic references. They also make easier to manage bibliographic citations and creating bibliography when writing a scholarly manuscript. Reference managers evolution over the last decades, until the emergence of new software tools available free of charge either as desktop programs or as web services, is revised. Basic features of the three more complete free reference managers currently available –Mendeley, Zotero, and colwiz– are reviewed. As an example, use of Mendeley is described with more detail. New free reference managers are able to meet the needs of most health care professionals for comprehensive management of heir documents and references collections.