ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Graduate Student Use and Non-Use of Reference and PDF Management Software: An Exploratory Study Marie Speare1 Final version published as: Speare, M. (2018). Graduate Student Use and Non-Use of Reference and PDF Management Software: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Academic Librarianship. 44(6), 762-774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2018.09.019 Published In: Journal of Academic Librarianship Document Version: Accepted Manuscript Publisher rights ©2018 Elsevier. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . 1 Sciences and Technology Library, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0766-2763 Email:
[email protected] ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT ABSTRACT Graduate students at the University of Manitoba were surveyed to find out if they used reference management software (RMS), features used, challenges and barriers to using RMS. Interest in different types of PDF management features and training options were also investigated. Both users and non-users of reference management software were invited to participate. Non-users managed their citations and references with a variety of other tools. The principal reasons for non-use were that students were not aware of options that were available, and the amount of time needed to learn the program. RMS users also mentioned the steep learning curve, problems with extracting metadata from PDFs, technical issues, and problems with inaccurate citation styles. Most of the students saved PDF documents to their computer. Students were most interested in full-text searching of PDFs, automatic renaming of PDFs, and automatically extracting citation metadata from a PDF.