Citation Managers: A Must-Have Tool in Your Research Arsenal

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Wherever you are in your graduate career, a citation management tool is essential to organizing, writing and sharing your research. Two free and highly popular citation managers that run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux are  Mendeley and Zotero.  In short, Mendeley is frequently used by physical and life scientists and Zotero by social scientists and arts and humanities scholars.  Below is a brief comparison.

Mendeley Zotero
Access, edit and insert citations into a document offline Yes Yes
Microsoft Word plug-in Yes Yes
Automatic download of citations from OskiCat and the UCB Library discovery tool No Yes
Insert citations into Google Docs No Yes
Free Storage for PDFs 2GB 300 MB
Annotate PDFs from within the program Yes No
Attach web pages and screen captures No Yes
Recommendations of relevant and highly cited articles Yes No
Connect with a community of scholars (i.e., academic social network) Yes Kinda
Collaborate with colleagues in the cloud Yesfree for up to 3 group members Yesunlimited
Automatically create citation records from PDFs Yes Yes
Easy de-duplication of item entries Yes Yes

 

Both citation managers allow you to easily download citation information and incorporate citations into your papers and publications.  Each has over 7,000 citation styles covering the vast majority of journals you’ll publish in.  Focus on research, reading and writing and leave citation management drudgery to either Mendeley or  Zotero.

If you’d like to set up a Zotero training session for five or more, please contact David Eifler – deifler [at] berkeley.edu to arrange a convenient time.

David Eifler (Environmental Design Librarian) deifler [at] library.berkeley.edu and Jeffery Loo (Optometry and Health Sciences Librarian) jloo [at] library.berkeley.edu