Results of the Initial Survey about "Bibliographic and Reference Information Management"

This page shows the results of the Initial Survey about "Bibliographic and Reference Information Management" conducted in February 2004. If you are interested in the individual answers of the questions asking for text entry, please visit the Survey Comments Web Page. However, if you are interested in the survey statistics, please continue below.

Survey Feedback

The email asking to fill out the survey Web form was sent to almost 8000 employees of ETHZ. We received 1016 answers in the first 10 days after the email had been sent, and subsequently stopped collecting answers.

The survey was conducted using a German and an English version of the text, but even though the answers based on the German form vastly outnumbered the English variant (830 vs. 186), this result page is available in English only.

Answers to the Questions

1 Bibliographic Information

Bibliographic information refers to information that identifies bibliographic documents (books, articles, papers, ...), but is kept separately and individually.

1.1 Do you use and maintain bibliographic information?

1.2 Do you share your bibliographic information with other users?

  1. No: 426 (41.9%)
  2. Yes, informally: 306 (30.1%)
  3. Yes, using authentication and access control: 38 (3.7%)

1.3 How do you enter your bibliographic information?

  1. Manually: 326 (32.1%)
  2. Copy/Paste: 185 (18.2%)
  3. Import: 243 (23.9%)

1.4 As a rough estimate, how many references are in your bibliography?

The answers are summarized in the figure at the end of this document.

1.5 Do you use any additional classification or information in your bibliography (such as keywords, abstracts, your personal thoughts regarding this publication, links to copies, ...)?

  1. No: 354 (34.8%)
  2. Yes: 391 (38.5%), please look here for the individual answers

2 Bookmarks

Web bookmarks are references to anything that can be identified with a URL (e.g., "http://www.ethz.ch/"). All modern browsers provide functions for creating and managing bookmarks, but not all people use this functionality.

2.1 Do you use and maintain Web bookmarks?

2.2 As a rough estimate, how many Web bookmarks do you have?

The answers are summarized in the figure at the end of this document.

2.3 Do you use additional information for managing your Web bookmarks?

  1. No: 267 (26.3%)
  2. Yes, I use folders: 632 (62.2%)
  3. Yes, but something different than folders: 21 (2.1%), please look here for the individual answers

3 User Expectations

The following questions discuss possible features of a Web-based solution for managing references (mainly targeted at managing bibliographic information and Web bookmarks). Please do not routinely click on all 'yes' buttons to indicate that more features are always better... It would be interesting to know which features you would expect to be of personal value to you in your scientific work, and which features you would consider dispensable.

3.1 Would you like to share your bibliography and/or bookmarks?

  1. No: 507 (49.9%)
  2. Yes, but read-only: 240 (23.6%)
  3. Yes, in a collaborative way: 269 (26.5%)

3.2 Would you like to manage your bibliography and bookmarks using a single tool?

  1. No: 720 (70.9%)
  2. Yes: 296 (29.1%)

3.3 Would you like to be able to access your bibliographies and bookmarks over the Web?

  1. No: 324 (31.9%)
  2. Yes, but offline access is important: 545 (53.6%)
  3. Yes, and online access is sufficient: 147 (14.5%)

3.4 If ETHZ provided a tool for managing bibliographies and Web bookmarks online, would you consider using it?

  1. No: 226 (22.2%)
  2. Yes, but it must be as easy to use as my current tools: 533 (52.5%)
  3. Yes, and if it provides more benefits, I would invest some time learning it: 257 (25.3%)

4 Do you have any comments about this poll?

All individual comments can be found here

Bar graph showing number of referencesThe results shown in this figure are the numbers from question 1.4 ("As a rough estimate, how many references are in your bibliography?") and question 2.2 ("As a rough estimate, how many Web bookmarks do you have?"). The majority of users answered these questions (72.8% answered question 1.4 and 89.7% answered question 2.2). The figure shows that the majority of users maintains between 20 and 500 references, and that most users maintain more bibliographic references than Web bookmarks. This is probably due to the fact that Web bookmarks tend to have a short lifespan, so maintaining a large collection of them is difficult and time-consuming (partly due to the fact that many tools do not provide good support for keeping bookmark collections up-to-date). On the other hand, bibliographic references are persistent, so that collections of bibliographic references tend to grow continuously.