Reference management tools

Go directly to the tutorials related to: Zotero | Mendeley | EndNote | BibTeX

Are you writing a thesis or another type of academic paper in which you want to cite the sources you have consulted, within the body of the text, in footnotes, and finally in the reference list?

It's not a good idea to write this data down by hand; the applications described in these pages will help you organize citations and documents in a coherent and time-saving way. With these tools, you will be able to:

• with a simple click, import bibliographic records from catalogs, databases, and websites;
• create libraries containing descriptions of sources, both bibliographic and non-bibliographic, that will form a permanent archive always at hand;
• store full-text files or other types of media associated with each source registered in the application; 
• choose a citation style, standard or customized, and apply it massively to the entire bibliography;
• share your citations with others when working on a group project;
• automatically generate the final bibliography of the document you are working on, based on the citations collected in the text; 
• add references using BibTeX and LaTeX.

Zotero is the recommended citation management tool because the license signed by the Library allows for unlimited storage space (metadata and files) for SNS scholars. A comparative analysis of functionalities published by University of Chicago Libraries shows that Zotero is evaluated as particularly functional thanks to its flexibility, interoperability, and ability to manage virtually any citation style.