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