RefWorks (and XML)
Posted in Uncategorized on September 28th, 2005 by darcusb – Comments OffIn my post on Endnote alternatives, Alf Eaton had sent me a ping about RefWorks, to which I replied I hadn’t beeen impressed the last I looked at it, something like a year ago.
Well, I just took another look, since my university has a license. It seems to have improved quite a bit, and is now quite useable. It has a fairly rich data model as these things go (indeed, it seems to be richer than Endnote’s at this point), and has good integrated search capabilities.
However, its XML export support is actually even worse–at least in terms of the design of tha format–than Endnote’s. Bizarrely, most of the output is the actual schema, while the content itself is a single “row” element with a ton of attributes, which are printed regardless of whether there is any content.
Well, at least it seems do well with RIS output.
I still wish we’d see a free software alternative. This isn’t exactly rocket science, and there’s room to best RefWorks, particularly in the GUI.