You have loads of references and don't see how this is going to help you.

A Good point why did I spend most nights for the best part of a year writing this? Because I feel there is a need for it. I studied at university for a number of years and although I finished before I had acquired a large number of references I certainly got enough to make keeping track of them boring and time consuming.

The problem is easy to see. By the end of a PhD most students have in the region of 200 references. Now I don't know about everyone but I don't know anyone that can keep all those in their memory (why would you want to anyway?). What you need is a way to simply index and catalogue those references. A piece of software that allows you to just enter a few search words and get straight to the paper you want.

Imagine this scenario. You are sitting there trying to write a report for your supervisor that has got to be handed in that afternoon. You can remember seeing a paper that was relevant and you want to cite it. In fact you even took a copy of that paper but it is now missing in that pile on the corner of you desk. "Nooooooo" you shout as you reach over to the pile to begin searching through it and accidentally knock it on the floor. Now imagine you have Refas. You simply start the application and enter a couple of search words. You hit the paper almost immediately and quickly open it. You navigate to the formatting section and copy the formatted reference to the clipboard and paste it into you report. Finally you go for a cup of coffee with the time you saved.

The essential idea behind Refas is that cataloguing references is boring and fairly time consuming. It is also not a process that generates any useful work in it self. By putting those references on computer and being able to search them when you what to you save yourself a lot of time and effort. What is special about Refas is that the references contained in the database are your references that are specific to your area of work not just a huge list of every paper ever written.

By being able to import and export references easily you can share them with colleagues and thus even save yourself the time of typing in the material needed to enter a new reference. We feel confident that if you start using Refas before long you will be unable to live with out it (ok maybe that is a little extreme - but you get the idea).