Graduate Student Use and Non-use of Reference and PDF Management Software: An Exploratory Study

Graduate students at the University of Manitoba were surveyed to find out if they used reference management software (RMS), features used, challenges and barriers to using RMS. Interest in different types of PDF management features and training options were also investigated. Both users and non-users of reference management software were invited to participate. Non-users managed their citations and references with a variety of other tools. The principal reasons for non-use were that students were not aware of options that were available, and the amount of time needed to learn the program. RMS users also mentioned the steep learning curve, problems with extracting metadata from PDFs, technical issues, and problems with inaccurate citation styles. Most of the students saved PDF documents to their computer. Students were most interested in full-text searching of PDFs, automatic renaming of PDFs, and automatically extracting citation metadata from a PDF. PDF annotation and reading tools were also of some interest. Mobile features were of the least interest. There were no statistically significant differences in the interest of PDF management features between the user and non-user groups but there were statistically significant differences in the interest of some of the training options between the groups.