Marine Biology: Citation Management Tools

What Do Citation Management Tools Do?

• Let you build your own database to keep track of articles you want to use
• Create folders and/or tags so you can organize articles however you want (eg, by class, by paper, or project)
• Storing PDFs and keep them tidy
• Detect and remove duplicates
• Offer browser plugins so you can grab articles directly from library databases,
• Integrate with word processors to format citations and bibliographies as you write your papers
• Offer features for group or shared libraries so you can share articles with colleagues.

Selected Citation Management Tools

There are a lot of citation management tools out there, and new "AI-powered" ones pop up every day.  These are three free tools that the Library supports: 

EndNote Online: online only, free for UCSD users, so must use VPN or campus network. Note: the more robust desktop application is not free. [Endnote Online guide]

Mendeley: online and desktop applications are both free. Limited free PDF storage. Best for: excellent PDF annotation tool and attached note-taking. [Mendeley guide]

Zotero: online and desktop applications are both free. Limited free PDF storage. Best for: grabbing screen-captures of websites you want to cite and refer back to the way they looked at the time.  Works with Google Docs as well as Word. [Zotero guide]

At all of these you will need to create an account, and you will want to select your own password. Don't use your SSO login for these.

For a detailed comparison of these, see our complete guide on Citation Software