Recommend me some reference/bibliographic management softwares, por favor

Oh hai there, I am back in school and will be writing lots of papers for the next two and a half years.

Once upon a time, in Round 1 of grad school, I used Reference Manager for bibliographic management/cite-as-you-type/bibliography generation. Endnote is also another popular option. And there there are some free applications that I know nothing about: http://www.bu.edu/library/research/tools/create-bibliographies/

I'm using Word 2010 and APA style. Any input would be hugely appreciated. I will even cite you in my next paper, why not?

Not sure what OS you're running, but when I last needed to deal with this on the long-term, Endnote was the supreme ruler. Others that I'm aware of are:

Sente - http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html
Papers - http://www.papersapp.com
Bookends - http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html
BibDesk - http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net

I'm running Windows 2007 on an HP (don't hate me). Thanks for the Endnote vote. I think I maybe have free access through the university? I like free.

Other thoughts appreciated. When I was writing my qualifying exam for my first master's, terrible, terrible things happened when going between an older version of Word on my desktop at home, and the newer version on the computer in my lab (which I used for printing); RefMan basically shit the bed and I nearly died of the stress of having to recreate the bib at the 11th hour.

Then definitely check with your university's office of academic computing, or whatever the equivalent dept. that handles IT for the University and ask if them has some kind of license agreement for Endnote - if they do you'll be able to get it for free (unlikely, but hooray if so), or at some sort of reduced annual license. That annual license *may* seem like a drag, but it usually entitles you to a copy of whatever the current version is. Endnote was (still is?) notorious for nickel-and-diming on upgrade costs and that eats away at software budgets.

It's frustrating because Endnote (as a company) is overly annoying. They have such a singular lock and inertia (and academic computing is FILLED with inertia) on the market that competitors never really seem to get any traction - especially when it comes to dealing with stupid shit like different versions of Word, the one faculty who refuses to use anything but WordPerfect, etc. I was a university IT guy years ago and I still get PTSD from it. The product itself is, enh... OK... I couldn't quite get my head around the workflow, but I wasn't a hardcore user of it either.

Anyway if you draw blanks, try your campus computer store. They should be able to get it for you at the academic rate, or they may already have it there.

(No OS hate. The jihad ended long ago)

Doh! Forgot to mention Zotero: http://www.zotero.org

It's free and has a following.

definitely check with your university's office of academic computing, or whatever the equivalent dept. that handles IT for the University and ask if them has some kind of license agreement for Endnote

good advice

at my alma mater, EndNotes and RefWorks are both available for free (covered by student fees) and the reference librarians do group and one-on-one training on both packages ... so ask a librarian, yo

Hmmm I don't know anything about RefWorks--I will have to check this out.

I actually asked this thread question of my current prof and "facilitator" (aka TA) I they were all "I dunno, use what you like." Next I shall try asking an actual librarian. Or, like, humanities grad student.

Ran across this which might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software