Reading Material for the Holidays: "Defeating Bedlam" - How to Organize the Information You Have So That You Know What You’ve Got.

Something to read over the holidays: "Defeating Bedlam," an interesting, amusing, and useful article from the New York Times blog "On the Wild Side" by the biologist Olivia Judson, on her experience using Zotero and Papers. Comments from other scientists comparing Zotero with EndNote provide useful information on the pros and cons of the two programs.

Olivia Judson is not only an evolutionary biologist and research fellow in biology at Imperial College London, but is also the author of Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex.”

New Software Patch for EndNote X2

EndNote has created a patch for EndNote X2 that fixes some of the software’s reported problems. Perhaps the most important new feature addresses what to many has been X2's annoying way of importing online search results automatically into an EndNote library. When you install the X2 patch EndNote will now offer three views within the program itself: one that automatically imports online results directly into your library; another that provides a temporary online view allowing you to chose which references to add to your library; and a general library view.

You can download the X2 software patch from the EndNote website.

Zotero Can Capture the PubMed Central Identification Number (PMCID) from PubMed Central but not PubMed

At the moment Zotero does not capture the PMCID from PubMed. It does however scrape it from PubMed Central.

Because many of the articles hosted by PubMed Central have DOI numbers as well, the PMCID appears in the 'Extra' field of the saved item.