Meet Joost Driesens, bibliographic management specialist

“We provide researchers with tailored advice on which bibliographic management programme is best suited to their specific research.”

Joost Driesens has worked as an information specialist at the University of Groningen Library (UB) since 2007. He specializes in information literacy, an important part of which is bibliographic management, the skill to manage and organize literature references.

What do you do as a bibliographic management specialist?

I coordinate the administration of the bibliographic management software programmes at the university. I teach reference management to students, I advise researchers and new employees and answer questions related to bibliographic management.

For the past ten years, the UB has only had a licence to Refworks. Today, we support four different programmes for managing and organizing references: Refworks, Endnote, Zotero and Mendeley. There are twenty to thirty programmes of this kind, but we focus on these top four. We currently have an official license for Refworks and EndNote.

Why is reference management relevant for researchers?

Our service is shifting from explaining how to use a specific programme to providing advice on what the various programmes can do and which programme is most suitable for your research. I encourage researchers to contact us if they would like to receive tailored advice on this subject.

The programmes for bibliographic management are constantly evolving. In general, they have ever more functionalities and at the same time, they become more user-friendly.

What is your message to researchers who do - or do not - work with a reference manager?

You don’t use a reference manager? Remember that bibliographic management tools can save you a lot of time. They not only help you to organize your literature references efficiently, but also to create reference lists in the output style of the journal in which you want to publish and to deduplicate large numbers of references. The latter is especially relevant for researchers who work with systematic literature reviews.

We are happy to help you investigate which programme is the most suitable for your research and your specific needs.

If you already using a reference programme and you are happy with it, keep at it, but make sure to also check out the other programmes that we support. These programmes basically have the same functionalities and it’s a matter of taste which works best for you. Our overview explains these differences.

More information

Bibliographic management at the UG

Contact

refmanagement rug.nl