NEWS

ProQuest Reimagines RefWorks Platform to Streamline the Research and Collaboration Process

ProQuest launched its new RefWorks® reference management platform, simplifying and improving research and collaboration workflows. With full-text management and tools for collaboration, the new RefWorks  platform addresses the needs of students, faculty and librarians with an innovative feature set. Libraries that offer this powerful service to their constituents have access to administrative controls that help their institutions respect intellectual property rights, professional support for themselves and their end-users, and analytics that provide a consistent source of information on patron and content usage.

A first release, which debuted to early adopters since January, integrated robust technologies familiar to current RefWorks subscribers with cutting-edge functionality including:

• Validation, correction and enhancement of citations by leveraging the proprietary 2.6 billion record Summon®discovery service index. 

• A modern, citation-style editor with a WYSIWYG interface to overcome the hurdles to implementing customized output styles.

• Built-in PDF reader with full annotation and collaboration capabilities, enabling individuals and teams to work more effectively, within and beyond their institution.

• Sharing controls which empower the library to determine how full-text is managed within the platform – ensuring respectfor copyright obligations.

• New add-ins for the Microsoft Store for Office 2016 and Google Docs, which overcome the traditional “downloadbarrier” in many institutions and ensures students have flexibility in their writing environments.

“The innovations we have implemented in the new RefWorks platform enable users to focus their time on the tasks that are going to produce better papers – like discovery, analysis and collaboration,” said Steve Guttman, Senior Director of Product Management, ProQuest. “We’ve taken a big leap forward with this new platform, and it will continue to evolve quickly. The latest release has some remarkable features.”

The most recent iteration of the new platform, released in June 2016 includes a variety of collection management and usability improvements, including:

• A folder and sub-folder hierarchy to simplify content organization, and tagging capabilities to quickly retrieve the ideal citations

• Database search: RefWorks now has a Z39.50 database search feature with an initial set of databases that include the PubMed® database, the Library of Congress and hundreds of library catalogs from subscribing RefWorks institutions.

• New Advanced search: This new capability allows RefWorks users to find information in specific sets of folders or within specific metadata fields in their references.

• New Citation style view: The citation style view allows references to be displayed in any of the RefWorks solution’s 4000+ bibliographic styles (or any custom styles) and identifies missing metadata to ensure accurate, complete citations.

• Improved Quick Cite: User interface improvements ease the process of adding bibliographic data to documentsusing Quick Cite, the RefWorks solution’s built-in tool for creating in-text citations and bibliographies for researchers who don’t use RefWorks add-ins for Microsoft Word or Google docs.

The new RefWorks platform builds on the success of the original – a market leader for 15 years--with improvements guided by feedback from customer development partners. These newest features follow on the heels of a release in April 2016, which delivered single sign-on, custom fields label management and rich text support for metadata.

RefWorks is designed to help libraries help their users. It goes beyond other reference management systems to enable researchers to save time and realize superior results in the creation of research papers. As a pure cloud service, it requires no data synching and provides a uniform interface and feature set across all library platforms.

http://www.proquest.com