Writing + Citing in the Sciences: Home

Overleaf is a free online collaborative LaTeX editor with integrated real-time preview. It offers hundreds of templates for arXiv, journal publishers, presentations, exams, dissertations, and more. The Library licenses Overleaf for Institutions to provide access to premium features for faculty, students, and staff. Sign up with or add your Berkeley email address to get access to these features:

• unlimited collaborators
• real-time track changes
• full document history
• symbol palette
• Mendeley and Zotero integration
• GitHub integration
• Dropbox integration

Non-UC Berkeley users can also sign up for a free Overleaf account that includes unlimited private projects, up to 1 collaborator, and direct submission to selected publishers.

Overleaf offers extensive documentation for learning about both LaTeX and Overleaf. It also hosts templates customized for UC Berkeley thesis, presentations, and more.

The Library also provides basic training on writing in LaTeX through our LaTeX in Engineering & Physical Sciences guide and VOLT tutorials.

Using Zotero with Overleaf

• How to Link your Overleaf Account to Zotero
• Step-by-step guide from Caltech Library

Using Mendeley with Overleaf

• How to Link your Overleaf Account to Mendeley

• Import your Mendeley library into Overleaf

• Managing shared references in your Mendeley groups

• Mendeley blog post series on LaTeX and BibTeX

Google Docs is available to UC Berkeley faculty, students, and staff through bDrive, the UC Berkeley instance of Google Drive. This is a popular option for collaborating with others on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms with unlimited storage. Zotero and Paperpile citation managers can be integrated with Google Docs to easily add citations and create bibliographies in documents.

Other emerging collaborative writing tools include Authorea, Fidus Writer, Manubot, and Manuscripts. Many of these tools support writing in Markdown and/or LaTeX. Nature recently published a story on Synchronized editing: the future of collaborative writing that discusses these tools.

Are you looking to improve your technical and scientific communication skills in English? These resources may help:

• IEEE English for Technical Professionals - interactive online course to advance technical communications skills
• Oxford Dictionaries - bilingual dictionaries including English to Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish
• Science research writing for non-native speakers of English (ebook) / Hilary Glasman-Deal - World Scientific Press
• Making sense : a student's guide to research and writing: engineering and the technical sciences (print) / Margot Northey and Judi Jewinski - Oxford University Press
• Scientific writing in a second language (print) / David Ian Hanauer and Karen Englander - Parlor Press
• Toward speaking excellence: the Michigan guide to maximizing your performance on the TSE test and other speaking tests (print) / Dean Papajohn - University of Michigan Press
• Writing science in plain English (print) / Anne E. Greene - University of Chicago Press

Zotero is a free and easy-to-learn tool that you can use to collect, manage, and cite references from your research. You can also collaborate with groups, add notes, and organize PDF files. A free account comes with 300MB of online storage space.

Visit the Zotero guide for more information.

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that allows you to organize your references across multiple devices, automatically generate bibliographies, and share references with collaborators online. A free account offers 2GB of storage space and the ability to create 1 private group with up to 3 members.

Visit the Mendeley guide for more information.

Citation management software helps you to collect and organize papers, cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles.

Popular citation management tools in the sciences and engineering include:

• Zotero is a free and easy-to-use tool for collecting, managing, and citing the sources you find during your research. It can be integrated with Google Docs, Overleaf, and Word for easily formatting citations while writing.
  • ​Zotero guide
• Mendeley is a freely available reference manager and academic social network that can be used to organize your research, create bibliographies, collaborate with others, and discover current developments. It can be integrated with Overleaf and Word for easily formatting citations while writing.
  • Mendeley guide
• BibTeX is a tool and format for simply organizing citations in a .bib text file. It can be used in LaTeX to format citations and bibliographies in a variety of styles. Overleaf offers extensive guidance on how to use .bib files with bibtex and biblatex, a newer package that is actively being developed.
  • JabRef is a free tool for more effectively organizing and viewing your .bib libraries and formatting references and bibliographies.
• EndNote is bibliographic management software that you install on your computer. It offers sophisticated, flexible tools for organizing references and creating bibliographies. EndNote works with Word to format citations and create bibliographies in a comprehensive variety of styles. Get the student price by purchasing online with proof of student status.
  • EndNote guide
• RefWorks is a web-based bibliographic management service licensed by the Library for use by current UCB faculty, staff, and students. It can be used to organize references, format citations, and create bibliographies in Google Docs and Word. To start using RefWorks, create an account using your @berkeley.edu email address.
  • RefWorks guide
• Papers is low-cost software that allows you to search, retrieve, organize, and annotate article PDFs. It can be integrated with Google Docs and Word for easily formatting citations.
• Paperpile is a low-cost web tool for collecting and organizing papers and easily formatting citations and bibliographies in Google Docs.