Posted by Duncan Maru, MD, PHD
It sometimes behooves the writers of this blog to take a step back from the daily grind of healthcare delivery in resource-poor settings and talk about something somewhat more “academic”. So humor me and allow a brief digression into the world of reference management software. You may in fact find this post practical and useful. As any colleague in academics, medicine, or that moderately oxymoronic field of “academic medicine” can tell you, central to what we do in our trade is manage our bibiolographies. Bibliographic citations after all are central to the efficient dissemination of ideas. One of the more frustrating aspects is identifying affordable (i.e., for most people, free) software that enables both excellent bibliographic management and collaboration. Every so often, I receive an email plea from a colleague as to how to get access to Endnote, which is one of the premier (albeit expensive) academic reference managers. There is not much I can offer them if their institution lacks a license. Furthermore, Endnote is not well-equipped to serve collaborative teams’ attempts to share references and writings efficiently. Beyond that, there is the free, open-source (and thus highly in line with Nyaya Health’s organizational philosophy), and well-featured Zotero, but I’ve never been able to get that to work all that well. There are of course a large number of other options listed on Wikipedia, but all exhibit too large activation energies for me.
Having just finished the first year of my medical residency and finally sitting down to dust off my academician’s metaphorical quill, I quickly surveyed the field to see if there were any new developments in the snails-paced industry of reference management software. To my geek’s delight, I came across two applications that I am now using to 1) efficiently catalogue academic content that I find via various scholarly search engines; and 2) share on collaborative documents. The first app is WizFolio, an application that extracts web content and creates references. A simple click of a button when browsing an article grabs the reference information. These references can be easily annotated and automatically cited within MSWord documents. References can be stored in folders and easily be shared via the web with colleagues, which is a major improvement over Endnote’s collaborative reference sharing method. I have found the interface to be intuitive, its tag and folder system to be efficient, and its note-taking features to be handy. It is much faster than the extraction mechanism of EndNote, which was limited to downloading the references from a bibliographic search engine (e.g., pubmed) and then uploading to your Endnote reference library. WizFolio is able to extract references easily from all sorts of files at the click of a button without any downloads. So yes, I don’t only use it because its free and its title creates a novel word using the suffix “Folio”; I also find it to have better functionality than the expensive EndNote software. The main drawback currently is that it has been a bit touchy citing directly within Google docs, which is what Nyaya members use for collaborative documents. This is because google recently overhauled its documents system, and WizFolio is struggling to keep up. It does currently support the old version of google docs. For this, the additional app I have been using is Offisync, which provides sync-ing capability between google docs and MSWord documents. By writing and referencing in MSWord and syncing with Offisync, we have our solution. Eventually, of course, WizFolio will add Google docs capability and cut out the Offisync “middleapp”.
Well, all of this of course presupposes a decent internet connection. These internet-based apps tend to perform woefully in bandwidth-poor environments such as Achham. The only app we have come across thusfar that truly meets our needs in Achham is Evernote, because it is an offline app with rapid sync-ing capabilities. WizFolio does not share that attribute, and in fact I think it would be hard for WizFolio by its nature to achieve that functionality. Still, hopefully, some of our other readers will find these resources useful. Your own thoughts and struggles with collaborative bibliographic managers are much appreciated.
