Reference Manager

» see refman.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Reference Manager was the first commercial reference management program anybody sold, and it was written by a doctor. Ernest Beutler was a hematologist who spent twenty years chairing medicine at City of Hope and another thirty at Scripps, with real discoveries behind his name in anemias and Gaucher disease. In 1982 he and his son Earl wrote software to keep his citations in order, and they put it out through their own company, Research Information Systems, for CP/M.

From CP/M it moved to MS-DOS, and from there to Windows and the Macintosh, which is a long way for one program to walk. Thomson Business Information bought Research Information Systems in 1994 and then bought the other two serious products in the category, EndNote and ProCite. Rich Niles, who had founded EndNote, ended up running the division that owned all three.

What happened after that is visible in the release dates. Reference Manager 12 shipped on 2 September 2008 and nothing shipped after it. Thomson Reuters stopped selling it on 31 December 2015 to focus on EndNote, and stopped supporting it exactly one year later. Ernest Beutler died in October 2008, the same year his program stopped being developed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the multi-user part ~

The reason labs stayed on Reference Manager long after it stopped being improved is a feature EndNote did not have. One database, many people writing into it at the same time, with each account set to read-only or edit. A research group could keep a single shared pile of references instead of mailing copies of a database around.

It also shipped Reference Manager Web Publisher, which put a reference database on an intranet or a public site so that anyone with a browser could search it and pull records into their own software. The documentation describes it interacting with SOAP and WSDL services.

~ the slow handover ~

By September 2015 refman.com was still a Thomson Reuters product page carrying two buttons next to each other, Buy Reference Manager and Try EndNote. The heading above them read "Make the switch to EndNote", and the copy underneath explained that EndNote X7 delivered many of your favorite Reference Manager features plus a host of others.

In January 2017 the domain stopped pretending and began redirecting to endnote.com, which it still does. The Science division that owned EndNote separated from Thomson Reuters in 2018 and became Clarivate, and Clarivate is who sells EndNote today.

~ the format that survived ~

Research Information Systems also defined a plain-text interchange format for bibliographic records, and because it was first and simple, everybody implemented it. That format is called RIS, after the company, and it is the thing you get when you click Export on PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore or a university catalog today. Zotero and Mendeley both read it, and so does EndNote, the sibling product that got the development money.

I have never run Reference Manager. I have handled dozens of .ris files without once thinking about where the three letters came from, which is the quietest kind of afterlife a dead product gets: the file format stays, the program's name falls off it, and the two Beutlers' company survives as an extension nobody reads as an acronym.

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