Free citation manger software/websites. Any recommendations or points to watch for?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I guess I am behind the times on citation management software, but I am feeling I need to get into it. I find, however, that there now seems to be a bewildering array of options, with prices ranging from several hundred dollars to free. I am pretty poor these days, and will have to pay for myself, so I like free, but which to choose?

My impression is that EndNote is the leading brand/industry standard, but it is expensive. On the other hand, there appears to be a cut-down, online only, free version. Is this a good idea, or is it too limiting? Would I be better off with one of the other free services, like Mendeley or CiteULike (or one of the many others that I have never heard of before)? If so, which?

Perhaps I should add that I have an Access database of about 4,000 citations that I use quite a lot, but it is in my own home-brewed format that is not going to be compatible with any of the modern software as it stands, so I would presumably have to be transferring data as needed by hand.* I have recently discovered, however, that for journal articles, anyway, simply looking up the title in Google Scholar usually gets you a choice of citations in MLA, APA or Chicago. It also offers to export the data into one of several different citation manager programs, but they all seem to be the costly ones. Can Scholar be made to work with any of the free ones?

Also, I find that journal publisher’s web sites, these days, generally let you download citation data in .ris format. Will the free citation management services be able to use that? I have tried viewing .ris data in Notepad, but it does not come out very readably formatted that way.)

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*There is a lot I do not understand about Access, but so far as I can tell, there is no easy and flexible way to export data from single records. I have been using cut and paste into a word processor, followed by a lot of tidying up by hand. This was actually much easier when I used to use Paradox 3.5 for DOS (!!!), but I could not get that to run under Windows 7, and had to transfer all my data to Access. Some of this data began life in a Viewstore database on my old BBC Micro, then went to dBase III for DOS, then Paradox 3.5, which stood me in good stead from Windows 3.0 to Windows XP, and now Access 2003 running on Windows 7.

2

Bump.

Does no-one know anything about this stuff?

3

EndNote is a fine choice.

We push EasyBib at this campus, but I don’t know if it will work for bulk citations like you need.

I would instead suggest writing a report in Access that can pull the citations you want and format them how you need (MLA, etc.). Or, slightly easier, write a Mail Merge in Word to import them from Access/CSV.

You may be able to import citations in bulk into easybib or endnote, or at least import as you go forward.

4

As I thought I had made clear, I can’t (not remotely) afford to buy EndNote. Posibly teh free cut-down would do me, but it looks very cut down.

I don’t think I am talking about needing bulk citations. It would be nice if I could import my Access database into a citation manager, but I am pretty sure that is not going to be possible. Due to its long history, it is just not formatted suitably. I would have to enter things by hand, as needed. (Or else by looking stuff up in Google Scholar, which might actually be quicker than copying over and reformatting by hand.)

As for EasyBib, that is a new one on me, and its not even listed on that long Wikipedia list of options that I linked to in my OP, but I will check it out. I just wish I had better idea of what sorts of features I ought to be looking for. All I want, really, is to be able to easily transform references I have entered from one citation style to another, and I want it to be easy to enter stuff, either by hand or from Google.