Citation Management
Barry Mauer and John Venecek
We discuss the following topics on this page:
We also provide the following activity:
Citation Management Approaches
Students often overlook the importance of managing and organizing their research as part of the literature review. There are many programs available online, such as Zotero. There is no one proper way to manage your research, but it’s important to have a system that works for you.
As you continue down your path to becoming a researcher, one of two things tends to happen. A) you have a closet full of printed journal articles that you are saving “just in case”, but you have no idea what’s in there, or why it was important; or B) you are constantly trying to remember what that one article was that you read that one time, but it wasn’t relevant at the time, so you threw it away; or C) all of the above.
Luckily there are citation management programs to help you wrangle and organize your research. As a bonus, they will format your bibliography into the appropriate style at the click of a button.
Watch Jada discuss her approach to managing her research:
Literature Research Strategies – Part 6 [1 min 38 sec]
More Resources
***New Resource***
The UCF community now has free access to the full version of EndNote, one of the most powerful citation management programs available. Accessing EndNote is free but requires a service request. For more information about how to get started, and for an overview of EndNote features, see the UCF Libraries EndNote guide.
Note that you will lose access to the EndNote option available through UCF once you are no longer affiliated with the university. There are ways to transfer your citations to another service, but you may want to consider an online option to avoid this complication. The most popular freely available options are Mendeley and Zotero.
To help get started, see the following sites:
For more information about each option, check out the UCF library’s guides to citation management
Looking for an easy way to compare the different citation management system features? See this chart created and maintained by Penn Libraries.
Citation Management [Refresher]
If you are using an offline version of this text, access the quiz for this section via the QR code.
