Reference Manager was the first commercial reference management software package sold by

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational corporation, multinational content-driven technology Conglomerate (company), conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and maintains its headquarters at 1 ...

. It was the first commercial software of its kind, originally developed by Ernest Beutler and his son, Earl Beutler, in 1982 through their company Research Information Systems. Offered for the

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/Intel 8085, 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Dig ...

operating system, it was ported to

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

and then

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and later the

Apple Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

. Research Information Systems was acquired by Thomson Business Information (later Thomson Reuters) in 1994. Subsequently, Thomson acquired EndNote and ProCite, the other two leading bibliographic management programs. Rich Niles, founder of EndNote, joined Thomson Reuters as head of that division, and put all development focus on EndNote. Sales of Reference Manager continued until December 31, 2015, and support ended on December 31, 2016.

Operation

Reference Manager is most commonly used by people who want to share a central database of

reference A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''nam ...

s and need to have multiple users adding and editing records at the same time. It is possible to specify for each user read-only or edit rights to the database. The competing package

EndNote EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliography, bibliographies and Citation, references when writing essays, reports and articles. EndNote was written by Richard Niles, and ownership changed hands se ...

does not offer this functionality. Reference Manager offers different in-text

citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...

templates for each reference type. It also allows the use of

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are a ...

s within a database. Reference Manager Web Publisher allows the publication of reference databases to an intranet or internet site. This allows anyone with a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

to search and download references into their own bibliographic software. It includes the functionality to interact with the

SOAP Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...

and

WSDL The Web Services Description Language (WSDL ) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also ...

standard services. Research Information Systems also created the " RIS Format" which is now a standard for interchange of bibliographic information.

Updates

After abandoning the development of Reference Manager in 2008, Thomson Reuters discontinued its sale on December 31, 2015, to focus exclusively on

.Thomson Reuters Reference Manager web page urging switch to EndNote
/ref> In 2018, the Science division, which owned EndNote, separated from Thomson Reuters to become Clarivate. EndNote X7 can import Reference Manager databases and convert Word documents formatted with Reference Manager into EndNote formatting.

References

External links

Reference Manager Email List Archive via the last scrape available in the Internet Archive

Issues with Word 2007
Reference management software Proprietary software Windows software {{Windows-software-stub

Operation

Updates

See also

References

External links