Citing Sources & Citation Styles

Learn about how to cite works in your research papers. Links to citation software that can help you create and manage your works cited lists.

Why Use a Citation Manager?

A citation, or reference, manager can be invaluable for researchers and writers, by assisting with the process of organizing cited sources. With a citation manager, users can effortlessly collect, store, and format citations, saving time and ensuring accuracy. It facilitates seamless collaboration, simplifies the creating of bibliographies, and offers an efficient way to track and manage sources, promoting overall research productivity.

Citation & Bibliographic Management Tools

Why Use Mendeley?

  • You want to gather and organize a variety of references from the Web and online databases. 

  • Mendeley is an academic social network as well as a citation management platform.

  • Mendeley has a very good integrated PDF viewer and can create citation records just from importing a PDF file. Mendeley.org has a very strong website and community platform.

  • Mendeley is owned by the for-profit publishing company Elsevier and can be integrated with your Elsevier or Web of Science profile if you have one.

  • Good for larger and long term projects and for networking with other researchers.

  • *Pricing structure: Free up to 2 GB (about 700-800 articles) with additional storage available for purchase.

See Mendeley Guides for more information, search tips, & tutorials.

 

Why Use Zotero?

  • It gathers citation records for non-PDF and PDF content. Zotero's single-click capture works with many databases and websites.
  • You can also enable the retrieval of PDF metadata, which allows you to create citation records just from dragging a PDF into Zotero.
  • Zotero is open source and cannot be acquired by a company.
  • Good for smaller or shorter term projects or papers.
  • *Pricing structure: Free up to 300 MB (about 100 articles) with additional storage available for purchase.
  • See Zotero Support for more information, search tips, & tutorials.