Beginning Your Research in English: Citation/Reference Management Tools

What is Citation/Reference Management Software?

Citation/reference management software manages your references and citations and integrates with word processing applications (such as Microsoft Word) to create bibliographies and insert in-text citations directly into documents. Most citation/reference managers have other features that import and export files, facilitate note-taking and annotating documents, and create social groups for file sharing. 

Common Features

• Import references directly from databases, catalogs, and webpages, or creates references manually. 
• Organize references into folders/collections/libraries.
• Allow the full text searching of references and attached documents
• Allow file attachment (e.g., PDFs, audio, HTML) and reference notation.
• Offer a wide variety of citation formats and styles
• Facilitate the sharing of reference libraries with others
• Free Online storage of references and attachments.

Zotero

I recommend Zotero as a user-friendly, free, and open-source citation/reference manager. Zotero was created at the Center for History and New Media and is well-suited to gathering and organizing sources of all kinds for historical research.