Automated Shared Bibliography Management

Supervisors: Denis Lalanne, Maximiliano Jeanneret Medina

Contact person: Maximiliano Jeanneret Medina (maximiliano.jeanneretmedina@unifr.ch)

Student: Looking for a student

Project status: Open

Year: 2022

Managing a bibliography at a research group or an organization level is a tedious task. Even more when multiple authors store different metadata for the same bibliographic item. Managing shared bibliographies can be performed with a dedicated software, namely bibliographic or reference management software (RMS) [3]. Mendeley, or Zotero [3] are commonly used. More generally, a RMS helps scholars organize their work, improve workflows and ultimately save time [3]. Such tools provide numerous features such as data import, collaboration, metadata extraction, and duplicate checking [3]. However, obtaining a clean bibliography, or maintaining several personalized bibliographies, requires manual tedious tasks performed by the researcher.

Managing bibliographic metadata related to publications of a research group can benefit from an authority source and (partial) automation. For example, ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) provide a registry of persistent unique identifiers for researchers and scholars, owned and controlled by them [4]. Moreover, ORCID is integrated with CrossRef, thus offering complementary infrastructures for uniquely identifying researchers and enabling them to connect with their publications [1]. The management of bibliographic information by the researcher reduces the risk of errors (e.g., reference ambiguity [2]), while the automated link with CrossRef allows an automatic population of the researcher’s bibliography [3, 5].

While numerous works investigated the adoption and the use of RMS [5], no study investigated the benefits of automatic, personalized, and shared bibliographic management. This project aims to implement a prototype to manage personalized bibliographies (e.g., per category, keywords, project) and an evaluation within a research group.

Keywords: bibliography management; reference management software; ORCID

Objectives:

  1. Provide a state-of-the-art on bibliography management
  2. Implement a prototype to manage and generates personalized bibliographies
  3. Evaluate the prototype

References:

[1] Haak, L.L. et al. 2012. ORCID: A system to uniquely identify researchers. Learned Publishing. 25, 4 (Oct. 2012), 259–264. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1087/20120404.

[2] Kim, J. and Owen-Smith, J. 2021. ORCID-linked labeled data for evaluating author name disambiguation at scale. Scientometrics. 126, 3 (Mar. 2021), 2057–2083. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03826-6.

[3] Nilashi, M. et al. 2019. An interpretive structural modelling of the features influencing researchers’ selection of reference management software. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. 51, 1 (Mar. 2019), 34–46. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000616668961.

[4] ORCID: 2022. https://orcid.org/. Accessed: 2022-05-09.

[5] Rempel, H.G. and Mellinger, M. 2015. Bibliographic Management Tool Adoption and Use: A Qualitative Research Study Using the UTAUT Model. Reference & User Services Quarterly. 54, 4 (2015), 43–53. DOI:https://doi.org/10.2307/refuseserq.54.4.43.