Citing Sources: Reference Management Tools

Reference management (aka Bibliographic management) tools allow you to save, organize, and share your own citation library, and format citations into a bibliography in the style of your choice.

The bottom line: what is best for you?

Zotero and Mendeley are both award-winning tools, RefWorks has the benefit of a large user base, and WizFolio offers strong search functions within its interface. However, none of these systems will consistently extract accurate metadata or operate without glitches. Generating a bibliography from any one of them will produce at least a few issues, either due to user- or system-error. So, which citation manager is best? It largely depends on how users interact with a system, where they find the majority of their sources, and which features are priorities for them. See Table 1 for a comparison between the various tools.

RefWorks began, and has largely maintained its identity, as a citation tool. The other three systems are research tools that also include a citation manager as one of their features. Mendeley is the most comprehensive research tool, allowing its users to create a library of articles and sources, annotate these sources by highlighting text or adding notes anywhere on a page, use the tool as an academic social network, and search a comprehensive library of shared resources for the latest or most popular articles in the field. If convenience is a top priority, Zotero is the handiest one-stop interface. This tool also extracts metadata from more types of files than its competitors.

WizFolio’s iPad version and its ability to import from the clipboard are two of its best features, while the ubiquity of the RefWorks Export button is helpful to many. RefWorks is also the only system that includes the convenient “create a bibliography” feature. The good news is that even if users have worked exclusively in one citation management system, they can easily export their library of resources into any other if they find a tool more suited to their needs.

“Automatic works cited and bibliography formatting for MLA, APA and Chicago/Turabian citation styles. Free version supports MLA only.

It’s for more than bibliographies. Sync your EndNote library across your desktop, iPad and online. Work on your research from anywhere.  Try it for free!

See this Guide for great information about RefWorks and how to use the different versions, Basic and Web.

"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, collaborate and share your research sources."  You can sync the information across your devices.

Works as a Firefox add-in, standalone software, and/or through the web interface.  Chrome and Safari plugins are also available.

Free! Try it now.

A personal research assistant. -  Zotero is the only research tool that automatically senses content in your web browser, allowing you to add it to your personal library with a single click. Whether you're searching for a preprint on arXiv.org, a journal article from JSTOR, a news story from the New York Times, or a book from your university library catalog, Zotero has you covered with support for thousands of sites.

Store anything. -  Zotero collects all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you're looking for with just a few keystrokes.

"...an online research management, writing and collaboration tool -- is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies."

RefWorks has not responded to a request for a free trial.

NoodleTools Premium: The Web's most comprehensive platform for the academic research process

Integrated tools for note-taking, outlining, citation, document archiving/annotation, and collaborative research and writing.
Differentiated, intelligent software and expert personal support for upper-elementary through university students.

Click here for the list of features of the pay version.

Free tools:

• NoodleTools Express: Just need one or two quick citations and not an entire source list? NoodleTools Express includes all of the citation forms (MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian) available in the subscription version. The difference? Your citations are not compiled into a source list and cannot be saved -- you'll copy and paste the citation you create into your document.
• NoodleTools MLA Lite: NoodleTools MLA Lite is a free version with a limited set of citation types appropriate for elementary or middle-school students. Notecards, outlining, collaboration, and sharing features are not included.
• NoodleTools Knowledge Base: We've answered thousands of your questions since NoodleTools was created in 1999. We've sorted through those e-mails and included the ones that we feel would be useful to other users in this knowledge base. Chances are that if you have a question about how to cite a source, we've already answered it and you can find it here.
• NoodleQuest: The Internet is a great place to find information about your research topic, but with hundreds of search engines available, its often difficult to know which one to use! NoodleQuest is a wizard that helps you get started down the right path. Just answer a few questions about your research topic and NoodleQuest will reveal some of the best search strategies you can use, and even explain why!
• Teacher Resources
  Debbie Abilock's award-winning Web projects:
  21st Century Literacies
  The Curriculum Collaboration Toolkit
  The Ethical Researcher

Sente 6 will change the way you think about academic reference management. It will change the way you collect your reference material, the way you organize your library, the way you read papers and take notes, and the way you write up your own research.
It is easy to get started with Sente. Both the Mac and iOS apps are free and can be used to create any number of libraries, each with up to 100 references. And you can sync up to 250MB of attachments with a free account. Upgrade to a premium account for unlimited libraries and unlimited sync space.  FOR MAC & iPAD.
 

"CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.

Why is it "social"?
You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource. You can help with this process just by using CiteULike and through the invite a friend feature."

refDot is a Chrome extension that pulls those citations from Amazon for you automatically.

With Amazon's massive book database in tow, refDot simply pulls out the citation information for the books your viewing and displays it in a TXT or HTML format. You can add as many as you need to all at once. The feature set doesn't include automatic newspaper article citations, but if you're referencing a ton of books it's a handy means to quickly get the information you need without having to sift through the copyright information inside the physical book.