This is a related question to my previous one about keeping advisees aware of literature.
Given the relatively large number of papers that are out there, it's inadvisable to force every student to start from ground zero in building up a reference library. To me, this suggests that there should be some centralized ways of keeping track of bibliography references.
The low-cost but high-maintenance route to me would be to have an SVN repository to which people can update their own personal bibliography files. Are there other more time-efficient routes to manage this process when:
- people have different computing platforms and workflows (Windows with Office, OS X with iWork, Linux with TeX, etc.)?
- working with collaborators at other institutes?
- it's important (according to university/workplace regulations) not to have data stored "in the cloud"?
Answer
I accomplish this using the groups feature of Mendeley. It works on all three major OS's, allows you to share bibliographies easily with both your group and external collaborators. It also allows something that I think is very important -- lots of bibliographies on particular topics within the realm of what my group does. See, for example
I should mention that Mendeley's web interface to bibliographies is awful. But the desktop interface is quite nice and (most importantly) can export Bibtex.
Mendeley does store your data in the cloud (if you consider a bibliography to be "your data").
Update: I stopped using Mendeley when it was bought by Elsevier. I haven't found a satisfactory replacement.
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