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One Health Study

About citation managers

A citation manager helps you keep track of articles and books as you find them, tag and annotate them, and easily create citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or other writing software. Using any citation manager will be more efficient for most scholars than not using one at all.

Most citation managers consist of three parts:

  1. a collection of your citations,
  2. browser plug-ins to more easily capture citation information from your sources,
  3. a plug-in or other way to easily get your citations into your work, usually in a variety of citation styles.

Even if you use a citation manager, you will still need to consider what citation style you plan to use (even though the formatting with many citation managers is automatic). This guide also include information about citation styles.

In this guide, you'll find information on: RefWorks, Zotero, MendeleyEndnote, NoodleTools, and PowerNotes.

If you have questions about choosing a citation manager, contact a librarian. You can contact your subject librarian for guidance. Also, feel free to contact us to when you have questions about best practices or if have trouble with these tools.

Citation Managers

  • RefWorks is provided by Penn Libraries for the Penn community (including alumni). It is a well-established platform, but has limitations in terms of working with PDF files.
  • Endnote works well for the health sciences and for large collections of articles, despite some technical and installation issues.
  • Zotero is an open-source software program that is easy to use. It has screenshot and simple web archiving capabilities.
  • Mendeley is research management software, so it includes search and PDF annotation. It suffers from accuracy issues.
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