You will learn about standalone tools, called citation managers, that can help you stay organized throughout the research project, and are especially helpful as you create citations. 

Citation management tools allow researchers to:

• Save and organize sources
• Take notes
• Create bibliographies
• Add in-text citations, footnotes or endnotes.

They work across platforms and on multiple browsers. They allow you to save all of your sources to one place, no matter where you find them.

Some citation managers also allow you to save and share your resources with others. 

Citation management software makes it easy for you to:

• Keep all your useful sources in one place.
• Seamlessly access your saved sources during the writing process.
• Automatically generate bibliographies or works cited lists in many styles.
• Take notes on sources, and find those notes again.

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 or request an EndNote workshop via our workshops on demand option.

In-Text Citations