Librarian
What is a bibliographic management tool and why do I want it?
Bibliographic management tools are tools that help you organize, manage, and cite the sources that you've found during your research. They can be great for so many things:
- Keeping track of those articles you found.
- Letting you search for a source that you've found by whatever criteria you'd like.
- Keeping annotations and notes about those articles.
- Allowing you to group articles by whatever you'd like.
- Automatically creating citations and bibliographies in your preferred style (yes, that includes APA 6th)
How reference managers can help with synthesizing across literature
You can tag articles within Mendeley or Zotero and search your library for those tags. Some articles will come into your library with tags already attached that you can choose to leave or edit. Once you've brought in enough articles, you will begin to see patterns across your library of articles. You can use the words that come up the most often as keywords to search within databases, you can take a critical look and see what's missing and use that information to search for more, and you can see what kind of date coverage you have. Your topic may necessitate articles that were published in a variety of years and it will be easy with Mendeley or Zotero to see what years you may be missing.
Comparison of citation managers
Adapted from a table by University of Wisconsin Libraries, used here under a CC BY 4.0 license.
|
EndNote |
Mendeley |
Zotero |
|
|
Add notes to references |
Yes, in “notes” field |
Yes, via “notes” tab in desktop version |
Yes, notes can stand alone or be attached to references |
|
Annotate PDFs |
Yes |
Yes |
No, but will sync PDFs annotated with 3rd party software |
|
Attachment limits |
Max of 45 attachments per citation; no limit on file size or total cloud storage |
No limit on attachments per citation; Attachment file size limited to 250MB; total (free) attachment cloud storage limited to 2GB |
No limit on attachments per citation; no limit on file size; Sign up with Carleton email for unlimited storage space |
|
Auto-complete data entry |
Yes, for author(s), keyword(s), and journal title |
Yes, for journal title, tags, keywords |
Yes, for author(s), journal title, tags |
|
Collaboration and sharing |
Free sharing of citations and attachments with up to 100 EndNote users |
Create public and private groups.
One private group with 3 members is free, costs for larger groups. |
Create public and private groups. |
|
Cost |
Free for Carleton students |
Free; option to pay for additional cloud storage or additional private groups |
Free; extra storage is paid for by Carleton. Sign up with your Carleton email. |
|
Creates formatted bibliographies and in-text citations in a word processor |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Direct export from online databases |
Yes, via web importer |
Yes, via web translators |
|
|
Direct search of online databases |
Can search the Mendeley database (papers in the libraries of other users) |
No |
|
|
Duplicate detection |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
