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Literature Reviews

Citation Management Tools

  Mendeley Logo Zotero Logo Endnote logo

 

These tools allow you to organize a personal database of resources that you can use to create citations and bibliographies.

Reasons to choose Mendeley:

Your research content is primarily scholarly and contained in PDF files: Mendeley has an integrated PDF viewer and can create citation records just from importing a PDF file. Mendeley has a strong social network and community platform.

Reasons to choose Zotero:

Your research content is diverse. Zotero can gather citation records for non-PDF content easily. Zotero's single-click capture works with more databases, catalogs, and websites than Mendeley's Web Importer. One drawback is that the web-add on decreases visibility within the browser.  

Reasons to choose EndNote:

Your research content is vast, complex and confidential. Endnote has unlimited desktop storage and provides up to 5GB of online storage. If you have privacy concerns, your records are secure because they are stored on your desktop not in the cloud.

Citation Manager Comparison Chart

Features

EndNote

EndNote Basic

Mendeley

Zotero 

Cost

$$$ Student discount

Free up to 2GB

Free up to 2GB

Free up to 300MB 

Share resources w/ others

YES

YES

YES

YES

Social network

NO

NO

YES

YES

Compatible w/current browsers 

Not web-based

YES

YES

Firefox – full features
Does not work w/ IE

Direct export from databases

YES

SOME

YES

YES

Creates formatted bibliographies, in-text citations,  & footnotes

YES

YES

YES

YES

Store PDFs

YES

NO

YES

YES

Annotate PDFs

YES

NO

YES

NO

Extract data from PDFs

SOME

NO

YES

YES

Citation styles

5000+
Customizable

21

6000+

16 installed
6000+ can be added

Access

Desktop

Web

Web & Desktop

Firefox extension

Mobile Technology

iPad

NO

YES

YES

Accessibility

ADA compliant

No information

Not accessible

Not enough information

 

Other Comparisons

There are numerous comparisons of citation management tools from other universities. Please note that some universities offer software discounts unavailable at UMass Boston. 

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