RefWorks, the research tools arm of ProQuest, LLC, US, has announced the latest release of features and enhancements to its web-based research management, writing and collaboration service for the academic and research communities. Many of these enhancements have been made in direct response to requests by RefWorks users.
Users can now further their research and collaboration efforts by learning more about authors through the new Author Linking feature. The feature links author names from the user's RefWorks database to possible matching profiles within the COS Scholar Universe database. Scholar Universe is a multi-disciplinary database containing profiles of over 1.7 million authors, university faculty and other scholars. Organisations subscribing to the database will automatically have access the complete profiles; non-subscribing organisations are provided with a more concise complimentary version of the scholar profiles.
RefWorks has new features for users with non-English or multi-language bibliographies. These features include special handling and automatic formatting of ordinal numbers; ignoring leading articles in titles when sorting the bibliography; and the ability to customise output styles for formatting in multiple languages. In response to recent changes in publication formats by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), new fields have been added to RefWorks. These include PubMed ID and PubMed Central ID. Accordingly, import filters have been adjusted to accommodate these new fields, and output styles can be modified to include such fields.
In addition, for users with visual difficulties, RefWorks has upgraded its interface to offer greater screen-reader compliance. This feature is easily enabled from several access points throughout the RefWorks service. To help users more easily update their database of citations, a Global Edit feature now enables moving, deleting or replacing of information throughout all references. Several other additions and improvements have also been made, including enhancements to search functionality, attachment file sizes, user-defined fields and administrator functions.
