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How to Cite Your Sources

What are Citation Managers?

Citation managers are tools that allow you to:

  1. Save, organize and annotate sources such as books, articles, videos, etc.

  2. Add searchable notes and tags to citations; attach pdf's if desired

  3. Quickly create a bibliography in multiple formats (MLA, Chicago, APA...)

  4. Automatically manage in-text citations in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice/OpenOffice

  5. Easily share references with others

As your research advances, citation managers will become critically important to help you organize and annotate the large number of sources your papers will require. Let's compare two popular (and free!) citation managers: Zotero and Mendeley.

Zotero vs. Mendeley

You cannot go wrong choosing either manager, but it helps if you take a few things into consideration before starting. Remember that you can switch between the tools, it just becomes less convenient the longer you use a tool and the more file attachments you collect.

Reasons to choose Zotero:

Your research content is diverse: It is the easiest method to gather citation records for non-PDF and PDF content. Zotero's single-click capture works with more databases, catalogs, and websites than Mendeley's Web Importer. Zotero also allow for collaboration between as many groups and as large a group as you'd like, so if collaborating and sharing research with classmates will be important to you, Zotero is the best option. Zotero is open source and cannot be acquired by a company.

 

Reasons to choose Mendeley:

Your research content is primarily contained in PDF files: Mendeley has an integrated PDF viewer and can create citation records just from importing a PDF file. You will be gathering a large number of research articles. Mendeley has a more free cloud storage than Zotero. Some people also think Mendeley's note taking space is easier to use. Mendeley.org has the strongest website and community platform.

The chart below has a full comparison of Zotero and Mendeley.