Retroid Raving

Anyone else ever wondered why some obscure Web-hosting company from another country should be advertising on the slip road off the M3 into UCT from the south?

I know I have...from long before there were such companies, and I used to come from the south.

But thanks to XKCD, all is revealed.

Find a gem like the Web-based Endnote referencing system via the UCT Libraries site, that is: it is cross-package (ie: supports Macs, about which, more later), integrates with Word up to 2010 version, and your browser of choice (Firefox seems the best option), and (best of all) is free to use for UCT staff, even if you are logging in via EZProxy!!

How many folk know about this?  Was it just me, labouring on in the dark and paying for my own software, or is everyone ignorant of this?

Now the way I found this was, I was trying to find out which bibliographic packages support Macs, me having having gone and got one and all (Mac Mini, since you ask B-) - and the answer was, precious few, and definitely not my 20-year package of choice, Research Information System's Reference Manager.   I do not even mention UCT's publicised offering of RefWorks, which it puts in the shade - which is probably where it deserves to be: I tried to demo that as an alternative to individualised PC-based software last year, and just gave up because it was so clunky.

So I looked at the comparison of offerings, trying to figure out how I would manage to keep my PC-based software and databases, and transplant to Mac, without spending a lot of money - and was struck by the mention of EndNote, which was the only one I knew anything about which supported Macs.  And happens to be in the same stable as Reference Manager.  And while I was mulling, I saw that there was a version which supported "Win, Mac & Linux", and thought, how could that be?

Turns out this was EndNote Web.  With this, your bibliographies and reference collections are accessed via Web - which we can even DO in real time these days, thanks to bandwidth increase (cue: applause for ICTS and partners), and has Word plugins like "Cite While You Write" (CWYW) that made RefMan so useful...and, it dawned on me, would be ideal for a PC-Mac transition, as I could use the same references via the Web on two different computers running different OSs...

<RAVE>WHY DID THE STUPID SYSTEM LOG ME OUT WHILE I WAS TYPING AND MAKE ME LOSE HALF OF WHAT I WROTE??  HEY?  HEY??? </RAVE>

... but what made it for me was the words in tiny print at the top of the screen, which I saw by accident:

EndNote Web is a Web-based bibliographic tool that integrates with the ISI Web of Knowledge...

 Really??  Could life really be that simple??  Because, you see, the ISI Web of Knowledge or WoK, is available via UCT Libraries, and off-campus via EZProxy - and is a VERY powerful reference trawler, and incidentally also very useful for the kinds of detailed bibliometric analyses one needs to do for akademic advancement, as well as the guilty private pleasure of calculating one's own h-factor*.

Well, yes and no, as it turns out.  Yes, one is able to access "My EndNote Web" via WoK access; yes, one can do seriously complicated searches and amass databases and reference lists...and no, not that simple, because using these things requires one to (a) have a login at the site (I had one; not sure why...?), (b) download some quite chunky software to make access via Firefox (or IExp) easier, for both PC and Mac, (c) ditto for interfacing with Word on both platforms for CWYW.

Still, I have managed to set up all these things, and to do searches from within EndNote Web, and import reference lists from out of my PC-based Reference Manager 11 onto the Web, and do WoScience searches (better than internal search machine) that include abstracts and citations, for export to EW in the background.  You can also do a multitude of things with the references on site, including having them in separate folders, publishing bibliographies....

All in all, a truly wonderful find - despite the fact it was not so much hidden under a bushel, as down a well in terms of accessibility!

*= like autoGoogling±, only more specialised

±= Googling yourself, idiot!