Guest Post: Two Free Reference Management Tools

[This post is from AuthorAID team member Alex Arreola. Thank you, Alex! —Barbara]

It has happened to most of us: You work carefully on a dissertation. Then you discover that a reference is in the wrong format. Or you write all your citations by name and date. Then you decide to submit your paper to a different journal—which requires them to be numerical and has a different reference style.

Writing and formatting references can be very time consuming, and there are almost as many reference styles as there are journals. Fortunately, a couple of free tools—Zotero and Mendeley—can make this task easier. I recently encountered these tools while writing a paper and preparing a presentation.

Both Zotero and Mendeley can help you index and organize your references. They do this almost automatically by downloading and categorizing the reference information from most papers that are online. Both have huge repositories containing the citation style for almost every journal. They also have Microsoft Word and LibreOffice extensions that let you cite directly into your paper and insert a formatted reference list at the click of a button—and change the format just as easily.

In my opinion, Mendeley has one advantage over Zotero. The advantage is that Mendeley is also an online platform. Thus, you can create a Mendeley account, download the program in multiple computers—and install the app in your smartphone or tablet—and access your papers and notes wherever you are. You can also create a folder and share the contents with the rest of your team.

I invite you to look at these programs and see whether one is right for you.