Need help organizing your sources? Using citation and bibliography management tools will help you collect, organize, and retrieve citations. Many can even work with your word-processing software to help format your final document with footnotes, in-text citations and bibliography creation.
About citation management tools
What is citation management?
- A collection of tools that can help researchers manage bibliographic information. It can also be referred to as citation software, bibliographic management or reference management.
How can using citation management tools help me?
- These tools can help by:
- Importing and organizing citations.
- Formatting in-text citations.
- Generating bibliographies in a variety of style formats.
- Organizing references into folders or collections.
- Having the ability to share folders with collaborators on group projects.
- Adding personalized notes and annotations.
What citation management tools does the library recommend?
- Librarians recommend using Zotero, an open-source reference manager that is free and easy-to-use. See more information about Zotero in the blue box to the left of this page.
Note on citation accuracy
While many library databases offer built-in citation generators, they are usually not 100% accurate and should be used carefully. If information about the article or book is input incorrectly, the citation generator will not know how to fix the errors. It's important to check your citations for accuracy using the corresponding style manual.
