RefWorks

What do you like best?

I love the idea and initially I thought it worked well enough.

What do you dislike?

I have several issues with the program.

1. The limitations of customizing entries, and the lack of possibility to create a completely new kind of reference type. .

2. The author field disregarding institutional authors (messes up both citations and bibliography if the name includes a comma). There are workarounds, but this is a known issue, and should be a fairly simple IF-code to get a solution.

3. The date format cannot be customized, unless using completely different custom entry points and deleting the official one from your custom bibliography.

4. The save to refworks bookmark, not being a button such as in "save to pinterest"-button. Also the pop-up should allow for adding relevant fields to the source.

5. A bug with write n cite and word. When trying to insert a citation, refworks gets stuck on Formatting document, and one is forced to restart word. One time it made all the text invisible unless hovering the mouse over different items on the home tab. But clicking any didn't help. I've tried uninstalling write-n-cite to no avail.

My main issue is the slowness of fixing problems, and the whole mess of the support pages. If the company knows of a specific problem and is allegedly trying to fix it, shouldn't they be upfront about it and post alternative solutions to it in the meantime? I have a hard time understanding how refworks can have such high ratings, and would not recommend it to anyone at the time being.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

RefWorks seems ok for storing your resources, but the write-n-cite issues are a dealbreaker at least for me.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

RefWorks is a citation management software. In my opinion it appears to have been stuck in a pre-2010 era. There is potential, but why unis would pay for this is beyond me.