I'd like to add to the discussion on bibliographic software. I use
a program called Idealist (from Blackwell Scientific Publishing, Oxford,UK).
It is fast, and good academic deals are available in the UK.
I like it because it is extremely flexible. I get lots of different
types of references (e.g. journal articles, chapters, books, conference
proceedings, databases, theses etc..) and I can keep all of these in a single
database. You could use it to index anything.
It is very fast because it indexes every word in every reference (apart
from a select few 'stopwords' like the,and,for,to,...etc..) You can customise
every aspect of its operations, and it is very easy to design import
formats for external data sources.
It supports OLE under Windows, and hence can link to word processors
fairly directly. It's also easy to use, and simple to set up.
Anthony Staines.
