Citation Management Tools

What are Citation Management Tools?

At their most basic, citation management tools help you collect citations for articles, books, webpages (and lots more) to use in your research, and to create bibliographies in your writing using a particular citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, and many others.) More advanced features in citation management tools allow you to:

• Store source materials such as PDFs
• Add in-text citations and bibliographies to your assignments and papers
• Share the citations you've collected with others



UA Libraries provides limited help and support for these three citation managers:

• Mendeley
• Zotero 
• EndNote (including EndNote Desktop or Online)

Mendeley and Zotero are free. EndNote is free to UA students, faculty, and staff through a campus site license.

Consider setting up an account for one of the tools and try it!  Once you choose a tool, you can always change your mind; citations can be transferred between tools. (Attachments like PDFs don't always transfer.)  

• Get started with EndNote
• Get started with Mendeley
• Get started with Zotero

Make an individual appointment with a liaison librarian at the Main Library or the Health Sciences Library (HSL) to learn more about choosing and using citation management tools. We are here to help!

See: What tools can I use to automatically generate citations in the format I need?