Freedom: export

"When you enter look for the exit": it may sound like a spy story motto.

Prior to selecting your product, prior to entering massive amounts of data, check the export facility, the available formats, test the export of all reference types and fields (if possible with any style attribute), default and custom. Open the export file and take a careful look at it, check how repeatable fields (namely authors and keywords) are handled. It is important that you may export also a code for the reference (document) type and that you properly separate the occurrences of any multi-value field.

All this will turn out to be crucial whenever you have to give your data to somebody else using a different system, and whenever you decide to switch to another software package. The latter is something that is very likely to happen, sooner or later : products come and go, whereas data are, and have to be, more stable; in general: data is much more important than the package you use to manipulate it.

Export should be available in delimited, tabbed, tagged formats.  Sometimes it turns out that the most efficient way to resort to a reliable export format is to design it as an output format having in mind the target system's format, and print data as a file. That's also why it is important to be able to output the RT the reference/document type of each record, be it a book, a journal article, a chapter in a book etc.

Conversely: import is very important.  Moreover: import should be the real way to double-check the export itself.