Fastest academic referencing softare for inserting and editing citations? (for Windows)

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 10, 2014 at 03:47 PM

Which is the fastest academic referencing software for inserting and editing citations into MS Word? By “fast” I mean how many steps in takes to select and insert a citation, and then edit it by adding page numbers or removing author names (if already mentioned in the sentence). The speed of the software itself also matters.

Currently I’m using MS Word 2010 and EndNote X4, with the two windows side-by-side. Selecting and inserting is easy, though it does take a few seconds of processing. But adding the page numbers and removing author names is a pain, as it takes too long (both steps and processing time). I’m on a Win7, 64-bit PC with i7 processor and 8GB RAM.

Typically for a 10,000-word document I may have 70-100 references, inserted multiple times (so it’s probably hundreds of individual operations). I do the inserting of EndNote code at the end of the writing process, replacing hand-typed placeholders for the given reference. While I’m also reading through the document, it’s frustrating that it takes me 2 days to do this.

Does anyone have a better experience/workflow with any of the other ref software out there (Zotero, Mendeley, Citavi, BibTex or newer versions of EndNote)? I don’t mind switching to LibreOffice, if it’s faster.

According to this blog post EndNote is faster than Zotero still for the above:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/zotero-vs-endnote/33157