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Citation Management

How do you keep all those citations straight? With a citation manager, of course.

Mendeley

Mendeley offers you:

  • Ability to share or collaborate with groups:
    • Private - Share references, full-text files, and annotations with group members (Limit of 1 private group with 25 members)
    • Invite-only - Share references only. Public can follow the group only. Good for sharing references lists.
    • Open - Share references only. Public can become a member or follow the group. Good for crowdsourcing reading lists.
  • 2 GB personal cloud storage/100 MB group cloud storage
  • Charges for more storage and the ability to have more private groups.
  • Mendeley offers the unique Literature Search feature, which allows you to search Mendeley’s catalogue of saved papers and add them to your own library.
  • There are free plugins for Word, LibreOffice, and BibTeX.  Once you have downloaded Mendeley, you can install the plugins from within the program.
  • Mendeley is not open source, but it has comprehensive videos and tutorials for users.  It also has very active support forum

Zotero

Zotero offers you:

  • Ability to share or collaborate with groups (no limit on the number of groups or members)
    • Private groups: can share documents and references with each other.
    • Public, closed membership groups: can share documents and references with each other.
    • Public, open membership groups: can share references, but not documents.
  • Unlimited data syncing/300 MB of cloud storage for file syncing
    • If you do not need to access PDF files on other workstations, you can turn off file syncing for unlimited full-text storage.
    • PDFs will only exist locally on your computer's hard drive; they will not be synced to Zotero’s cloud servers.
  • Charges for adding more storage
  • Generally considered better for saving web pages, especially if you use the Firefox plugin.
  • The free plugin for Word and LibreOffice is included in the Zotero Standalone version.
  • Zotero is free/open source and has an active development community, as a well as a comprehensive getting started guide.  It also has very active support forum

EndNote

EndNote Basic offers you:

  • Ability to share and collaborate with groups:
    • You can allow someone to view your references
    • Can not share attachments
    • Create a shared group that all members can edit
  • 2 GB personal attachment storage
  • Free for basic account.  $250 for full EndNote
  • Web based only, no software to install.
  • Can not read citation information from a PDF.