Author: Águeda Delgado-Ponce – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion

In a previous post we reflected on the characteristics and advantages of using reference managers in the research, without concreting on anyone. In the present, we intend to address the particularities and differences of two managers really used by the scientific community: Refworks and Endnote.

Refworks is the main tool contracted by the Universities for the creation of databases and personal library of the users. It requires therefore, belonging to a university and a previous registration. This way, you will have your bibliography accessible through the Web being able to:

• Import and organize all your references
• Share folders and collaborate with other researches.
• To give bibliographical format to your writings with Write-N-Cite

Similarly to EndNote, there could be done searches since the program by itself in databases and there are several ways to add a reference to the library: manually, exporting, importing, etc. in order to organize them later on into folders and using them in the writing of scientific writings adapting the corresponding format (APA, Harvard, MLA, Vancouver).

However, and despite of their similarities, there are some differences between both managers that it is important to take into account. EndNote results to be less intuitive and in some aspects management is complicated by requiring explanation. Similarly, this manager also counts with its Web version, a desktop version that requires download to a particular computer. For this reason, the files that you add on RefWorks are available on the cloud, while the ones of EndNote are locally in the PC. RefWorks has a function that will indicate you on which fields you will need to log in to create a complete reference according to style you are using, a characteristic that EndNote does not have. But EndNote makes it a little bit easier to put the page numbers in text references in Word, given that it slenderizes the numbering of pages according to the reference style that we are using.

Finally, and as a characteristic to highlight in the scientific field where collaboration on research is the priority, RefWorks facilitates to share libraries among different people, as well as the complete texts, being more limited the shared use in the Clarivate Analytics manager.