Web-based Citation Management Tools: Comparing the Accuracy of Their Electronic Journal Citations

Comparison of the Accuracy of Bibliographical References Generated for Medical Citation Styles by EndNote, Mendeley, RefWorks and Zotero

“…In agreement with the previous studies (Brahmi & Gall, 2006;Homol, 2014;Kessler & Van Ullen, 2005) analysing the quality of the bibliographical references from reference managers, the results of this research show that none of the reference managers produces all bibliographical references without mistakes. The Zotero reference manager achieved the best results because it had remarkably excellent results in references for the JAMA journal and the NLM style.…”

“…1 shows an example of such comparison). In the same way as in the previous studies (Brahmi & Gall, 2006;Gilmour & Cobus-Kuo, 2011;Homol, 2014;Kessler & Van Ullen, 2005), different types of mistakes for individual resource types were detected. Similarly to the Homol's study (2014) we divided the errors found in references into three categories.…”

“…This was an alleged inability of these managers to generate the titles of documents correctly. In the past the RefWorks reference manager was blamed for this mistake (Gilmour & Cobus-Kuo, 2011;Homol, 2014) but our research found that the reason for such mistakes is the incorrect setting of the reference style. This means that in fact, while RefWorks generated proper names with lowercase initial letters for the Annual Review of Immunology and Journal of Clinical Endocrinology, the proper names were generated with capital letters in the references for other journals and the NLM style.…”

“…These tests should be performed primarily by librarians who, as information professionals, can best work with the structure of bibliographical records and data created from them. In the past, it has repeatedly been proven (Basak, 2014;Gilmour & Cobus-Kuo, 2011;Homol, 2014;Kessler & Van Ullen, 2005) that a number of authors had made mistakes in references as a result of incorrectly imported and insufficiently corrected records from different online sources and databases. Naturally, librarians can help the authors to check and correct mistakes, but a more sophisticated solution could lie in consistent verification of reference managers, their functionality and the quality of the bibliographical references they generate.…”

“…As Homol (2014) pointed out, an analysis of other sources is needed. Although journal articles are and will probably continue to be the most frequently cited type of resources, various studies show that 16.5% of 81,834 references published in ten medical journals were to sources other than an article (Barrett, Helwig, & Neves, 2016;Delwiche, 2013;Rethlefsen & Aldrich, 2013).…”