Learning, teaching and writing with reference managers

Reference managers, also known as citation managers, were designed to create bibliographic citations but have evolved into powerful tools for education. In addition to their core competency of easily managing in-text citations and automatically generating a list of works cited, modern reference managers can help researchers manage increasingly large libraries of portable document format (PDF) files, web pages and other documents. Users can annotate, store, organize, tag and search PDFs. These programs fetch useful associated metadata such as publication information, author lists and article abstracts. Additionally, the programs create a searchable index that can include the article abstract and often the complete text of many articles’ PDFs. Modern reference managers allow for rapid creation, organization and classification of a curated collection of reference articles that can be made available anywhere, including on mobile devices. In this article the author describes how pediatric radiologists can use reference managers to facilitate learning, teaching and writing.