Citation and Document Managers
Citation managers (also called reference managers or bibliographic management software) offer a way to collect, store, and manage references. They work with your word processing software when you are writing a paper or manuscript to easily manage in-text citations and format bibliographies.
Citation Manager Comparison Chart
Document managers are an emerging kind of software that can help you collect, store, and organize the PDFs that you use in your research.
Document Manager Comparison Chart
- Available to UC Berkeley users without cost
- Entirely web-based, so it can be used on all operating systems, at any computer connected to the internet
- Format bibliographies in Word
- Import citations from RSS feeds
- Full-text access to most articles is a breeze because UC-eLinks works inside RefWorks
- Good for collaborative projects because it allows for sharing of citation databases
- Easy to learn and use
- Does not offer as many output styles as EndNote
- See our RefWorks Support page for tutorials and additional information
- Offers sophisticated, flexible tools for organizing references and PDFs and for creating bibliographies
- Offers most comprehensive array of citation output styles
- Link EndNote records to PDFs and other types of documents saved on your hard drive
- New in EndNote version X2 and higher: download article PDFs automatically
- Use UC-eLinks to find the full text of the article from within EndNote
- EndNote software must be purchased and installed onto a Mac or PC
- EndNote is not very intuitive, but is not difficult with training
- Best option for large research projects
- Current version of EndNote Web is not recommended
- See our EndNote Support page for tutorials and additional information
- Free online social bookmarking tool specifically made for academic papers
- Use your own tags to organize your citations
- Does not format bibliographies, so it requires exporting citations into EndNote, RefWorks, or similar
- Ability to track new articles appearing in CiteULike under a specific tag or by a known user
- Good for collaborative work
- Mac only software
- Find, organize, review and cite the academic literature
- Build and maintain your library of PDF files, both new articles from publishers' website and PDFs already on your computer
- Import one PDF at a time
- Format bibliographies in Word
Zotero (Online Firefox Extension)
- Free Firefox extension that helps manage citations found online through the browser
- Automatically capture citation information from web pages
- Import citations from other citation managers
- Store PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages for easy retrieval
- Zotero is bound to the installation of Firefox on your computer, but you can install it on a portable version of Firefox on a USB drive to allow for traveing with your Zotero library
- Create bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice
- Zotero has a relatively small number citation output formats, but plans to grow rapidly
Mendeley (PC, Mac, Linux)
- Free software/web hybrid for PC, Mac, Linux (useful, but still has a lot of bugs)
- Organizes and manages the pdfs that are already on your computer
- Introduces social networking tools to collaborate with fellow researchers, including sharing lists of references and collaborative tagging of documents
- Sync PDFs to your web account for access to them anywhere you are online
- Annotate PDFs
- Search within the text of all of your PDFs
- You can find more information about it on the Mendeley website.
- Good way to capture citations from the PDFs on your computer and export them into EndNote
- Low-cost software for Macintosh only
- Search, retrieve, organize, and annotate article PDFs
- Easily export references into citation management tools like EndNote
- Import PDFs already on your hard drive
- Search results from Papers' single search box may differ from the databases' native search interface
- Mac only software
- Find, organize, review and cite the academic literature
- Build and maintain your library of PDF files, both new articles from publishers' website and PDFs already on your computer
- Format bibliographies in Word
Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Comment Form. Last update:
01/03/12
