Comparison of the Accuracy of Bibliographical References Generated for Medical Citation Styles by EndNote,Mendeley, RefWorks and Zotero

Bibliographical references to online and printed articles, books, contributions to edited books and web resources generated by EndNote, Mendeley, RefWorks and Zotero were compared with manually written references according to the citation instructions in 15 biomedical journals and the NLM citation style. The fewest mistakes were detected in references generated by Zotero for 11 journals and the NLM style, while the second fewest number of mistakes was found in Mendeley. The largest number of mistakes for 9 journals was found in references generated by EndNote and in the other 4 journals the largest number of mistakes was detected in RefWorks references. With regard to the individual types of resources, the lowest number of mistakes was shown by Zotero, while RefWorks had the greatest number of mistakes. All programs had problems especially with generating the URL and the date of access in the reference to online documents. It was also found that several mistakes were caused by technical limitations of the reference managers, while other mistakes originated due to incorrect setting of the citation styles. A comparison showed that Zotero and Mendeley are the most suitable managers.