Research Management Software

Originally published 28th September 2011:

As I mentioned in my last post, I've recently returned from the annual September Seminar at Warwick Business School. It finished with a half day workshop on the Project and Dissertation which was very helpful in that it gave me a much better idea of how to approach this daunting exercise.

Two things in particular became obvious to me - the first is that I will need to do a helluva lot of reading.
The second is I need to track what I read and keep it organised so I can make use of it to inform my decision making and reference it properly in the write-up.

As an illustration of this one of the speakers from the weekend, a WBS MBA graduate, told us how he has built a succesful consultancy business around having a well-indexed archive of relevant research as a direct result of his P&D, so this process should be rewarding in the long-run.

However, I'm a geek and therefore what sort of software to use for this is one of my first questions (I'll get onto hardware later). A quick plea for help on Twitter pointed me towards JabRef and Zotero.

Zotero was also one that was suggested by WBS, along with EndNote and ProCite. Fortunately, I have a Human Resources Management essay to write in the next month which I can use as a trial run. I'm going to try and evaluate both Zotero and JabRef - I don't think it's practical to try and use more than two, so sorry if you cheerlead for one of the others, and there are many!

I'm going to look at ease of use in the process of gathering and assimilating relevant literature, and then in how easily I can cite references in the text. As of today I have nothing so this is tabula rasa stuff.

I'll start by Googling for suggested workflows, reading the tutorials and actually trying to use these two systems. I'll be doing so on a variety of harware and platforms - desktop, laptop, netbook, Windows XP and Linux. I'll even try using my Android smartphone if I can!

Check back here in a few days for the results.