As the product manager of a reference management solution, I’ve learned an incredible amount over the years about what professionals value most when authoring documents and citing references. In the video below, we break down the top three things to look for when considering a reference management solution, based on the many conversations we’ve had with our customers:
1) How easy will it be to adopt within your organization?
As a corporate professional, having easy-to-use reference management capabilities tightly integrated into the tools you use will provide significant time savings, and therefore deliver immediate benefits to users across your organization.
Some tools may require users to move back and forth between Microsoft Word for example, and a reference management solution, when adding or editing references. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but all those clicks add up and take away valuable time from highly skilled professionals who are authoring the documents.
Look for a tool that enables users to cite references from centrally managed libraries directly through Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. Having access to a reference management tool that is embedded into your everyday tools will improve efficiency. Finally, consider what level of complexity you and other users will want to be exposed to. Simple solutions that require low levels of training will promote faster adoption of your chosen solution within your organization.
2) Does it make it easy to centrally manage new references?
As a researcher, staying up to date on new information can be challenging. You may use multiple search tools to find relevant information, and those references can be saved in multiple places. If references are not saved in one location with specific identifiers, it can be difficult to recall that information when needing to cite those references later on.
Because of this, you must make sure your reference management solution provides integrations with your preferred search and discovery tools, such as Google Scholar or PubMed. That way, references can easily be added to specific libraries/folders for faster recall. Additionally, make sure your solution can provide document creators with specific access to only the collections of carefully curated articles that are approved for citing for your particular use case.
3) Is document delivery integrated? If so, what about copyright?
In life sciences, safety and regulatory teams frequently submit documents to regulatory authorities which requires attaching the full text PDFs of articles cited within a document. In many reference management solutions, this requires you to copy and paste individual citations into the reference manager, or to use a separate software tool or process to get access to or request a copy of the article, which can be very time consuming in a moment when time is of the essence.
Instead, look for a tool that supports the ability to order multiple references within a document at once. Taking it one step further, you can save significant time and money if your reference management solution can automatically detect if a reference is included within your subscriptions or has already been ordered by a team member and is therefore accessible for re-use under your company’s copyright license. CCC’s RightFind Enterprise offers seamless checking of re-use rights, so teams can check whether an article they already have a copy of can be sent to a regulatory body under their existing copyright license.
It’s not always easy balancing the requirements of the various groups of users that rely on reference management to work effectively and efficiently. But if you can find the right one, a reference management tool can play an essential role in saving time and streamlining workflows across many use cases within corporate environments.
For more information on a reference management provider that offers all these critical features and more, check out RightFind Cite It from CCC.