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Citation Management
Students often overlook the importance of managing and organizing their research as part of the literature review. There are many programs available online, such as Zotero, and The Libraries offers free access to software such as Endnote. There is no one proper way to manage your research, but it’s important to have a system that works for you.
As you continue down your path to becoming a researcher, one of two things tends to happen. A) you have a closet full of printed journal articles that you are saving “just in case” but you have no idea what’s in there or why it was important or B) you are constantly trying to remember what that one article was that you read that one time, but wasn’t relevant so you threw it away (or C) all of the above.
Luckily there are citation management programs to help you wrangle and organize your research. As a bonus, they will format your bibliography into the appropriate style at the click of a button.
Let’s watch Jada discuss her approach to managing her research:
There are many citation management options to choose from. The key is to find the one that works best with your research style. The three most popular options freely available to UCF students are Endnote, Mendeley, and Zotero. To help get started, see the following sites:
For more information about each option, check out the UCF library’s guides to citation management Looking for an easy way to compare features? See this chart created and maintained by Penn Libraries.
