I’ve used a citation managers/ bibliographic managers for years – ever since I came to my current job in which I do in-depth literature searching for scientists and engineers. I report my results as an annotated bibliography with analysis. To do this I need to search a bunch of research databases and compile the results and then export them into a bibliography in a useful and attractive format.

Also, I do information analysis and I compile the citations before I do some things (see my series on the same).

So WHY DOESN’T IT JUST FREAKIN’ WORK!!!!

Seriously. Why?

• You select things to export and go to the next page and they aren’t still selected (IEEE Xplore).
• Half the time the journal name doesn’t export (Scopus- maybe fixed now),
• no page numbers or volume numbers export (Scitopia – BY DESIGN??!?!),
• it says direct export, but then it shows it on the screen (AIP Publishing!),
• like 8 digit publication years, “DOI:” in the doi field,  conf papers published in journals come in as generic with nothing in the right place (Inspec on EbscoHost),
• accession number in User field #1 (which we use for something in one shared account I have – EngineeringVillage)
• you have to save the file down instead of direct export because you’re using a product that competes with their product (Web of Science)
• all kinds of freaking weird stuff (DIALOG format 4)
• INIS – conf proceeding editors in the author field( in file 103 in DIALOG – almost delivered a product with co-authorships that never happened!)

I just want to pick my items, keep them until I’m ready, and hit a button and have them show up in my account. No editing required. Engineering Village is close, but I really don’t understand why it’s so hard. Ebscohost breaks its export to Refworks like every 3 months – they change some aspect of the data export without telling anyone, a hundred of us scream on the administrator’s list, Refworks rushes through a fix, tests it, and releases it within hours.  I guess it’s too hard for people to consider the consequences of changing their data formats before they do.

Ok, rant over.