Reference Manager was the first commercial

reference management software Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations (references) as well as managing project reference ...

package sold by

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...

. It was the first commercial software of its kind, originally developed by

Ernest Beutler Ernest Beutler (September 30, 1928 – October 5, 2008) was a German-born American hematologist and biomedical scientist. He made important discoveries about the causes of a number of diseases, including anemias, Gaucher disease, disorders of ir ...

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/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

operating system, it was ported to

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...

and then

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and later the

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

. 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 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 ''name'' ...

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 A note is a string of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document or at the end of a chapter, volume, or the whole text. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of th ...

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 of ...

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

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly 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 all ...

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 is application software 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 screen. Browsers are used on ...

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

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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