Skip to Main Content
site header image

Citations + Writing

MGH IHP's general guide to citations and writing

What are Reference Management Tools?

Sometimes called citation management tools, reference management tools are used to help organize your citations.

Here are some ways that you can think of these tools:

  • A research assistant: it helps you collect, organize, and cite the sources you're using in your research papers.
  • A research organizer: many tools allow you to save articles, PDFs, and other resources and organize them into folders for different projects.
  • A citation wizard: they help you automatically format citations and bibliographies in the styles that you need. No more manually formatting!
  • A timesaver: since you don't have to worry about collecting and formatting citations, you can focus on writing and researching.

In a nutshell, citation management tools will help you save time, reduce stress, and improve the quality of your work! Below we've shared information on two popular citation management tools, Zotero and Mendeley.

Zotero

Zotero Logo. The Z is in burgundy and the rest of the letters are in black.

Zotero is a free citation management tool whose central feature is that it can easily and accurately import items directly from the web. It has a desktop application as well as a "Browser Connector" to make it work with most major browsers. Zotero also integrates into Microsoft Word and GoogleDocs for easy citation insertion and reference list creation.

New to Zotero? Take the D2L workshop!

Quick Set-Up Instructions

Do you need to import your library from RefWorks?

Take a look at our page about Transitioning from RefWorks to Zotero for step-by-step instructions.

More Help

Mendeley

Mendeley Logo with white text on a red background

A popular option for citation management is Mendeley, a free program that organizes both your references and your PDFs, with some social media capabilities.

Among other features, Mendeley has a Microsoft Word plug-in for inserting citations into your papers, will create formatted bibliographies, and allows you to annotate and share your PDFs. It will sync all of your citations and annotated PDFs across the web and your devices. It even has a mobile app for PDF reading and annotation.

Please be aware though, that like Zotero, the Word plugin doesn't support the Office 365 version of Word. Unlike with Zotero, Mendeley Cite does not work with Google Docs.

Quick Set-Up Instructions

  1. Create your Mendeley account. You are not restricted to your IHP email and may use whichever email address you prefer.
  2. Set up your profile with as much or as little information as you would like. The Mendeley profile adds a social media facet to your account. You can connect with other people doing research in your field, for instance.
  3. Once you have reached your dashboard, you can download the desktop version of Mendeley. Install this program to easily import your PDFs, from which Mendeley will extract the bibliographic data necessary to generate references.

More Help