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CHEM 433 - Advanced Organic Chemistry

Research vs. Review Article

Research Article: Primary literature article where the main focus is research, experiments or theory similar to a lab report.  The article is narrow in scope and often cited within reviews.  It is less connected with the literature discussion.   The authors describe experiments that they did.  A methodology/ experimental section is included.  

Review Article: Secondary literature where the main focus is the literature and what is being discussed on a topic.  They are often cited within background or introductions of research articles to help others come up to date.  They are a good entry point into the literature on a topic and are broad in scope similar to an encyclopedia article.  The authors summarize and evaluate other research.  Methodology could include what searches were used and what documents were included or excluded and why.  
 

Which reference manager is for me?

Feel free to try two or three different ones and see what you like! They all specialize in different additional features and act in slightly different ways, but they will do the same primary things: keeping track of sources, helping you organize them, and generating citations and bibliographies. 

Some tips on where to start:

  • I work mostly with PDFs.
    • Mendeley tends to do the best at managing PDFs of journal articles and book chapters.
  • I use a lot of different computers, so something web-based would be best.
    • RefWorks or EndNote Web is web-based and easy to get started with.
    • All of the others will let you see you library of references from a web interface too, but may not be as full-featured on the web.
  • I need to keep track of a bunch of attachments: art pieces, images, data sets...
    • Zotero might be a good place to start, because it makes it obvious how a general record relates to a bunch of attachments.
  • I need to customize how the software interacts with my citations.
    • ​EndNote Desktop has the steepest learning curve, but it also has the most flexibility in formatting citations.
  • My group wants to share references using this software.
    • ​EndNote and Refworks have the most robust tools for sharing references among a group. (For free, at least.)