Citation management software makes it easy for you to:

• Keep all your citations in one place
• Search the papers you collect by author, title, journal, subject headings or your own keywords
• Insert footnotes or endnotes directly into your documents
• Automatically generate bibliographies or works cited lists in particular style formats
• Take searchable notes that are all stored in one place
• Share group libraries of articles with collaborators (depending on your software)

Zotero is a free tool you can use with almost any browser that collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use and lives in your web browser where you do your work. Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections (or groups you can share with collaborators) for different projects, and create bibliographies using Word (for Mac or Windows), Google Docs, or OpenOffice.

Learn more about Zotero by clicking on and watching the Intro to Zotero video above, going through this step-by-step guide or come to a Zotero workshop led by OSU librarians either online or in-person (see schedule).

EndNote is a personal citation/bibliography manager software program that helps researchers organize references in a library.  References in the library can be used to easily create bibliographies and format references in word processing software.  The most robust and fully-featured version of EndNote is the client version, which is loaded onto an individual users machine (a multi-user option is also available). EndNote is free for OSU students while at OSU.

Learn more about EndNote at this guide.

Many people like to know the pros and cons between the various citation management software choices before they start using a particular tool.  Here is a brief overview of the differences between three common tools: Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley.  A more in-depth comparison between EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero is attached if you are interested.

Check out the current library workshop calendar for workshops on Zotero.