Allow for one or more commentary fields of relatively unlimited length. Construct a bibligraphy according to the selected format. Export its data in a common format, so that these data can be imported into another manager or other software. In general the first four of the above are crucial, since they define the software as a manager of bibliographic data rather than a determiner of what kind of data may be managed. A tool or set of tools for scholarly record-keeping .
Bibliographic management is only one kind of scholarly record-keeping.
More broadly, research often if not usually treats bibliographic information as part of note-taking. In many kinds of scholarship the end is not to compile a bibliography but to document ideas. In the final, written form these ideas take, they tend to be ordered by the argument that subsumes them rather than by their original source. Murray's method remains as useful today and forms the basis for a general model of handling scholarly information. Asking the question of current software shows its strengths and weaknesses.