A very useful list of citation management tools for the social sciences, humanities crowd.
Citation management tools enable researchers to capture bibliographic information about research materials, create bibliographies, add footnotes, and manage research collections. Some citation management tools also make it easy to share references with other researchers.
Tools:
- BibDesk: “BibDesk is a graphical bibliography manager for OS X, providing powerful BibTeX file management for Mac users.”
- BibMe: Free web-based bibliography maker generating MLA, APA, Chicago and Turabian citations
- Bibus: Open source “bibliographic and reference management software” that is designed for collaboration, hierarchical organization of resources, and live query of medical databases such as PubMed (Free, cross-platform)
- Bookends: Reference manager with support for retrieving bibliographic information and related files from the Web, automatically generating bibliographies, etc. (Commerical, Macintosh)
- Citeline: “a service to facilitate the web publishing of bibliographies and citation collections as interactive exhibits and facilitate the sharing of this type of data.” Import Zotero and BibTex files. Part of MIT’s Simile project. (Free, web-based)
- CiteULike: “A free online service to organise your academic papers.” (Free, web-based)
- Connotea [Review]: “Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists”
- (Free, web-based)
- EndNote: “EndNote for Windows and Macintosh is a valuable all-in-one tool that integrates the following tasks into one program: Search bibliographic databases on the Internet; organize references, images, PDFs and other files; construct your paper with built-in manuscript templates; watch the bibliography and figure list appear as you write” (Commercial; Windows and Macintosh)
- Heurist: A collaborative academic bookmarking, bibliographic and general database with rich data types, annotation, record interlinking and publication capabilities, including bibliography output and citation within Word. Reference import and bookmarklet (Free, web-based, Open Source planned 2009)
- JabRef: “bibliography reference manager” that generates BibTeX files (open source, cross-platform)
- Mendeley: “Free social software for managing and sharing research papers. It is also a Web 2.0 site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics.” (Free, Windows, Macintosh and Linux)
- NoodleTools: MLA, APA, Chicago and Turabian citation management integrated with note-taking software which teaches analysis of source types, provides personal help on any citation, and includes feedback from instructor. (Free and fee, web-based)
- OttoBib: Enter an ISBN number and receive a formatted citation (Free, web-based)
- Papers: “Papers bundles all the great technologies that come with Mac OS X to give you a completely new workflow for reading scientific articles. You seek, download, archive, and organize all your articles within a single application. But that is just the start, using spotlight you instantly find the paper you are looking for. Read it fullscreen, add your notes, send a copy to a colleague…” (Commercial; Macintosh)
- Referencer: “a Gnome application to organise documents or references, and ultimately generate a BibTeX bibliography file” (Open Source; Linux)
- RefWorks [Review]: “RefWorks — an online research management, writing and collaboration tool — is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.” (Commercial; Web-based)
- Sente: “Sente 5 is the next-generation academic reference manager. Sente helps you find, organize, review and cite the academic literature in your field, and it does it in ways that you have probably not thought possible before. Sente also helps you build and maintain your library of PDF files for these references….Sente also excels at properly formatting bibliographies in your papers” (Commercial; Macintosh)
- Zotero [Review]: (Free; Windows, Macintosh and Linux; requires Firefox browser)
- Comparison of Reference Management Software: Wikipedia comparison matrix of citation resources
From digitalresearchtools / Citation Management Tools
Thanks for the mention of Mendeley, Sorin! The Wikipedia comparison is a good one, and if you’d like a focused comparison of the more successful reference managers, there’s one at Nature Network.
Also, I’d like to mention that Mendeley was recently featured on Techcrunch.
Dear Debbie and Sorin, Thanks for this very useful list. Citation is a critical part of scholarly practice – and open sustainable digital citation is a necessary requirement of scholarly practice in the networked age. We here at the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne have been chasing this dream for quite sometime and you can see some of the fruits of our labours at the website above. Although what we do is much more than bibliographic citation, it is an essential component. Regards . . . Gavan McCarthy, Director, eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne.
Thanks for the comments, you have a great resource site.