When was the last time you sat up until 3 in the morning trying to get your citations squared away right before the deadline? Tired of forgetting where you got that perfect article? What about remembering what sources you still needed to read and review?
No more! Reference managers can help!
Reference managers are tools that help you:
The River Campus Libraries offer and support a ton of different reference managers. Find one that works for you, and never spend the last few hours of a paper fighting with citations again!
Feel free to try two or three different ones and see what you like! They all specialize in different additional features and act in slightly different ways, but they will do the same primary things: keeping track of sources, helping you organize them, and generating citations and bibliographies.
Some tips on where to start:
Ask an expert!
See the provider's documentation!
For RefWorks, start with their Introduction to Refworks guide.
Mendeley offers a number of Getting Started guides and Video Tutorials.
EndNote's support page has a ton of great resources.
Zotero has a robust documentation page including screencasts.
Do you have a favorite reference manager that we haven't listed here? Let us know by email and we'll see about adding it here.
Mendeley has a both a desktop client and a web version. Using both together works really well - in the web version, you can easily add citations from any computer, and there is a "suggest" function that will show you similar articles to the one in your Mendeley library. The desktop version is great for editing citations, adding tags, and adding references to your paper-in-progress.
You can add citations to your paper in progress with a Microsoft Word plugin under the "Tools" menu.
If you use another word-processing application, you can just drag and drop the citation from Mendeley into your Google doc or Pages file for the bibliography. You'll have to manually enter the author-date for in-text citations.
To begin, sign up for a new account at the link above. You'll need to allow popups for RefWorks to work properly.
For a series of short, introductory videos, they are on YouTube here.
With RefWorks, you can automatically import your citations with just the click of a button! Look for the "export" button, and choose RefWorks, and they will be added to your citation list.
Below is a very short video showing you how easy it is!
RefWorks also has Write-n-Cite, which is a plugin for Microsoft Word. It allows you to add citations to your paper as you write it, using any citation style you prefer, and easily add a "works cited" page at the end!
Zotero is the best tool for capturing web pages, videos and blog sites. They have a great 3-minute introduction here. It works best with Firefox, but is compatible with any browser.
Zotero lets you easily import citations right from your browser. It allows you to cite these sources in Microsoft Word and other word processing programs.
Here's a quick peek from the librarians at Wake Forest showing just how easy it is to use:
Getting Started With Zotero, from Idaho State University Libraries:
EndNote is available for Windows and Mac OS X. Copies downloaded from the link above are licensed through the University of Rochester Libraries, so you don't have to pay for it! You'll get free updates as long as you're affiliated with the University.
An additional user guide is available on your computer:
EndNote has a desktop version (link above) and an online version that you can link to here. This allows you to add references to your library from any computer.
Below is an example of taking a lot of journal citations from one journal and putting them into EndNote in a batch.
To easily export from Google Scholar:
Follow these steps to configure Google Scholar to send references to EndNote online:
To add the ability to search UR catalog from within Endnote:
Go to this page, and follow the directions. http://endnote.com/downloads/connections?title_op=contains&title=rochester