Refworks and usability
Went to a quick Refworks intro yesterday, and was fairly impressed with what this puppy can do. I don’t think it’s going to become my favorite thing ever, but it’s not unuseful.
One part of it, however, thoroughly appalled me. To import citations, I had to tell Refworks what kind of database I was importing them from. Not which database, mind you—what kind of database.
How unutterably lame is that?
Hey, Refworks? Get your programmers off their lazy butts to write a recognition routine right this very minute. Users absolutely should not have to care what’s on the back end of the databases they’re using. It’s not like you don’t know one database citation format from another anyhow; you had to write the import routines!
Sure, sure, you’ll still need to have the “tell me what this is, please” screen in case the recognition heuristics you write fail or the user tries to give you garbage. But nine times out of ten, the user shouldn’t need to see this screen. Refworks should just know what it’s been handed.
There are other problems with (the campus implementation of?) Refworks; getting into it from off-campus is a study in tooth-pulling, and it doesn’t play entirely nicely with browsers that aren’t Internet Explorer, more shame to it. But not being able to recognize incoming data is just a killer.
Fix this, Refworks. Fix it now. Shame on you, imposing this kind of stupid pointless task on users.