Mendeley is a freely available reference manager and academic social network with web-based, desktop, and mobile versions. You can sync your library of papers between these different versions and across different computers.
UC Berkeley Mendeley users gain access to Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) by accessing Mendeley via a UCB IP address (note: when off-campus, use the proxy browser bookmarklet, or the Mendeley link below, or the VPN Full Tunnel, to take you through a UCB IP address). This gives UC Berkeley users 100GB personal library space, 100GB shared library space, 100 collaborators in private groups, and unlimited private groups. After leaving UC Berkeley, alumni will have access to MIE for 12 months. Contact librarian Becky Miller with questions or problems concerning MIE.
Non-UC Berkeley Mendeley users can still sign up for a free account, which offers 2GB of web space and the ability to create 1 private group with up to 3 members, or can upgrade to a premium plan to access more space or groups.
Note: Mendeley is moving away from Mendeley Desktop to a new "Mendeley Reference Manager," which is currently available in beta. However, it appears that features users appreciate in Desktop are not yet available in Reference Manager, so you may want to use Desktop while it's still available (Mendeley Reference Manager replaced Mendeley Web as of 9/7/2020).
To insert citations and bibliographies into your document, you have two options. One may work better with your word processing setup than the other:
OR:
Reference managers (also called citation managers or bibliographic management software) offer a way to save, organize and manage references. Many work with word processing software to format in-text citations and bibliographies for papers and theses, allow you to share references, and enable you to attach or link PDFs to a citation record.
Wikipedia comparison of reference management software