[Air-l] Citation Managers - Alternatives to Endnote/CiteULike/... ?

[Axel Bruns]

Dear AoIRers,

I'm wondering if any of you can suggest useful alternatives to research
citation manager tools such as Endnote or CiteULike. My approach to research
is to store key quotations from a source alongside the bibliographic
reference, but none of the standard tools I have come across seem to do this
particularly effectively (e.g. in Endnote, the best available workaround
appears to be to create an additional field for quotes in the bibliographic
record, but this is clunky and doesn't work very well with multiple quotes
stored against the same record).

My preferred workflow would be a two-step process:


1. Create a primary bibliographic record for the source, e.g.

[2] Graham Meikle. _Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet_. New
York: Routledge, 2002.


2. Create (multiple) quotations as secondary records stored against the
primary one, e.g.

[2.1] "People who hope to draw attention to issues can use the Net in a host
of ways, but few are effective without the eventual participation of the
older media." (5)

[2.2] "One way to measure the success of many of the projects . is to ask
how effectively they can use the Net to force their cause onto the agenda of
the mainstream media." (8)

etc.


Are there any tools (preferably open source, possibly Web-based) which do
something along these lines ? Obviously I'm also keen on functionality to
convert references automatically into a number of referencing styles (MLA,
APA, etc.).

Failing this, the best alternative I can see is to use a tool such as
CiteULike for the primary references, and create an additional database
which stores quotations against the CiteULike references, but this seems
kludgy at best. Hopefully there's a better solution ?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, and if there's any interest I'll post
a summary of what I find...

-- 
Dr Axel Bruns                 a.bruns at qut.edu.au - http://snurb.info/
Media & Communication    Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove, Qld. 4059, Australia
Creative Industries Faculty              Z2-202, CIP - (07) 3864 5548
Queensland University of Technology                CRICOS No.: 00213J