Choosing a Citation Manager
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Thank you to Melissa Vetter from Washington University in St. Louis for lending parts of her excellent guide on citation managers, "How to Choose: Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote."
What is a citation manager?
Citation management software allows you to download citations and articles from various websites and databases, electronically store and organize the citations, annotate and highlight articles, and format the citations for your paper and bibliography. Citation management software also makes it easy to share references with other researchers. We recommend EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero and NoodleTools as the best options for University of Utah researchers. Please consult our comparison table to find the citation manager right for you.
Use each citation manager because...
Use EndNote:
- Because it is more flexible, customizable and has more citation styles than any other program
- Because it gives you the ability to create your own citation style or document type
Use Mendeley:
- If your research content is primarily contained in PDF files
- Because it has the strongest community platform
- You can create your own research profile to share and promote your work to scientific communities
- Make your research and CV discoverable to others in your field
- See what others in your field are reading and commenting on
- Network with other scholars to discover research trends and discoveries in your field of study
- Because out of the three, Mendeley is the most similar to social networking sites
- Because it has the strongest website
Use Zotero
- If your research content is diverse
- If you're using many web-based publications and other websites that may be difficult to cite
- Allows you to easily save snapshots of webpages and annotate them within your citation library
- Because it's best for gathering citation records for non-PDF and PDF content
- Because Zotero's single-click capture works with more databases, catalogs, and websites than Mendeley's Web Importer
- To search for groups relevant to you to network with other scholars in your field of study
Use Noodle Tools
- If you want to learn how to manually put together your citations
- You are new to academic writing and researching and need guidance organizing your research
- If you are an undergraduate writing a short research paper with 10 or fewer sources
- Because teachers can monitor student's research process
