Do You Need a Citation Manager?

• Do you have dozens of tabs open on your web browser while you're doing research?
• Do you have lots of article PDFs downloaded to your computer with nonsensical file names? 
• Do you often search your email to find articles or reports that your colleagues or classmates sent to you? 
• Do you struggle with citing? 

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, a citation manager can help! 

Citation management software can help you:

• Keep track of the sources you're using for your research
• Organize the sources you've found with folders or tags
• Share those sources with collaborators
• Automatically create a draft* bibliography and/or in-text citations/footnotes in a citation style of your choice. 

(*While citation management programs can do most of the work creating citations, they are NOT guaranteed to be perfect. Check your automatically generated references against a guide to your citation style before submitting assignments/manuscripts.) 

Common citation managers include: 

• EndNote (basic free version, paid subscription for full product provided by some U-M departments)
• Zotero (free)
• Mendeley (free)
• RefWorks (paid subscription, not supported by U-M)

This module will introduce you to Zotero.