Reference Management all’Università di Tallinn

Do you remember my survey on the usage of Reference Management Softwares I did while I was studying in Tallinn, and presented at the IC-ININFO 2011 conference, in Greece? After a misteriously eternal lapse of time, the conference proceedings are finally available online, published in the Advances on Information Processing and Management (AIPM) book serie. The platform, curioser and curioser, hosts just a single pdf file with all the proceedings. Mine is on page 293. If you want to do quickly, you can read the pre-print from E-Lis, at this URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16975.

In the meanwhile, while you read the article and note down any observations you may want to share, I make an inner toast, and go back to work on my thesis – which is nothing but an extension of that research.

Reference Management all’Università di Tallinn

Un mio articolo per IC-ININFO 2011

Time ago, commenting on my paper on Biblioteche Oggi, I said that I was working on a survey about the usage of Reference Management Softwares (RMS); I finally completed my article, and I am happy to announce that it has successfully submitted to the IC-ININFO – International Conference on Integrated Information, which will be held in Kos, Greece, from 29 september to 3 october 2011. I will not be able to participate, unfortunately – it would have been nice to spend 3 days on an island on the Aegian sea, right? – but I will present the paper “virtually”: the website of the conference will provide an online space where the presented articles will be discussed.

The article will be also published in the conference proceedings, which should be open access; I will give you more details as soon as I get them.

For now, I can give you some brief details about my study; it was a questionnaire administred to the scholars of Tallinn University (TLU) about their usage of RMS; the results can be summarized as follows:

  1. due to the structure of TLU, responses came mostly from humanities – scientific disciplines are scarcely covered
  2. there is general awareness of RMS (75%) but not much usage (only 56% of active usage)
  3. Endnote and Zotero are the most used softwares, followed by Refworks (for which the library provides licenses and support)
  4. the role of the library for support is not always indicated (only 11%) but mostly for lack of interest; generally the opinions about library staff and competence are good
  5. a general lack of comprehension of the potential of the RMS emerges, and more advocacy is advisable.

It doesn’t look much, I know. As soon as I clarify the issues related to the publication, I will post a link to the full article; I also hope to get deeper into this type of studies with my master thesis, which I will start next January. For the moment, I am happy to have collected some actual data to work on!

Un mio articolo per IC-ININFO 2011