Food Science: Citation Management

Citation management tools for organizing your research

Effective citation management is critical to performing a comprehensive or systematic search of the literature. In the process of doing research, you will encounter a multitude of resources including books, articles, and websites.  Keeping all of these organized as you progress, creating bibliographies or lists of resources, and collaborating and sharing information can be a daunting and time-consuming task. 

Citation management tools can be a great way to do all of these things and more.  With a relatively easy-to-use tool, you will be able to organize and save the resources you find in databases and on websites.  And with virtually the click of a button, you will be able to generate bibliographies in nearly any citation style.

There are a number of citation management tools available that are compatible with many of the databases and resources you'll use.  Visit the citation management help page to get started.  It only takes a few minutes to set up an account with such tools as Zotero and Mendeley.  If you are affiliated with the College of Human Ecology or CALS, you can download an Endnote license (see box to the left).

To learn how to use these and other citation management tools, consider a workshop at Mann Library or Olin Library.

Image credit:  Tony Hammon, from Flickr