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Managing the reference management software

Kylie Black

Senior Librarian: Science

University of Western Australia Library

kylie.black@uwa.edu.au

@KylieBBlack

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Citation Software issues

Roll-out and roll back of EndNote X9
Trial of Mendeley Support – now Mendeley Institutional Edition for 3 years (CAUL Elsevier agreement)
Issues are not unique to UWA

Let’s work together!

Most universities support at least one citation software program
Citation software librarians email group

Managing the reference management software

The UWA Library has had an eventful two years in managing citation software for both EndNote and Mendeley. There were highs and lows – the roll-out and roll-back of EndNote X9, the trial of Mendeley support and grappling with issues around Mendeley Institutional Edition. This lightning talk will provide an overview of the challenges and how we addressed them, with a view to opening up a dialogue among Australian academic libraries supporting all citation software systems.

Over the last two years UWA has overcome many hurdles in relation to citation software support. UWA currently supports both EndNote and Mendeley, with in-depth EndNote support and some support for Mendeley. Today, I’d like to share some of the issues we have faced in citation software support and how we addressed them.

At the start of last year the Library rolled out EndNote X9 to all campus computers, only to find an issue with page numbers in in-text citations disappearing when the document was reformatted. In the most alarming instance, one student needed to redo all the references in her PhD thesis. Clarivate was aware of the problem and had been for several months, o the decision was made to roll-back UWA’s supported version of EndNote to X8 until a fix was released by Clarivate and thoroughly tested. Happily it is now working, although later in the year there was the problem of EndNote compatibility with the new Mac operating system, Catalina. Fortunately, thanks to a thorough communication plan this seemed to have minimal impact on the UWA community.

Mendeley was recently added to UWA’s list of supported programs. It happened in a very unusual way; after a trial of Mendeley support in 2018, minimal support for the free version was recommended. Within a week of this recommendation being approved the CAUL Elsevier deal came through, which included Mendeley Institutional Edition for three years. UWA Library sees that the strength of MIE lies in its collaborative functionality so it was decided that some support would be provided – with the fine print made clear, that UWA has access to this upgraded functionality for three years, but the free version allows limited collaboration.

I’m sure none of these issues were unique to UWA.

So…. Australian higher education institutions seem to be independently reinventing the wheel when it come to issues relating to citation software support. Most, or maybe all, of our institutions support at least one citation software program, run classes and maintain online support material. We have all had a lot of head scratching over the implications of the MIE three year deal, if we weren’t already MIE subscribers – we know this thanks to the discussion and survey that took place recently on the CAUL datasets list, in the absence of a dedicated forum. The survey showed a range of opinions reflecting different institutional values but the majority of libraries were taking up the deal albeit with varying degrees of publicity and support.

We all know that Libraries have a very long history of cooperation and collaboration, it is one of the strengths of our sector. I think we should be discussing citation software issues with a similar degree of enthusiasm to information literacy. One way we could start might be through a citation software librarians email group, open to anyone with an interest in citation software or even referencing support more broadly.

At the Special Interest Group this afternoon, Caitlin Stone and I will be talking more about citation software support and how it relates to academic conduct. I’d really welcome the opportunity to get your feedback on this idea and exchange details and see if we can get something started.