Manage Your Citations (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) & More: Best Practices: Home

Zotero, an open source (free) program, may be used in conjunction with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. The most up to date tips and help are on Zotero's website. Zotero features include:

• Your Zotero library is saved locally so if you want to use multiple computers, set up the Zotero Sync Server and File Syncing on each computer you use to collect citations using Zotero.
• An Internet connection is not necessary to work with your Zotero library.
• Automatically capture citation information from web pages.
• Capture citation data PDFs to create a database record in Zotero.
• Store PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages for easy retrieval.
• Works with Google Docs and LibreOffice (in addition to Word)
• Chromebook users: see this installing information. Mendeley Reference Manager may be a better bet on a Chromebook.

Need more help? See a Zotero guide and the Zotero support site.

The Library occasionally offers Zotero Workshops, especially toward the start of the semester.

This self-paced online tutorial includes several very brief Zotero how-to videos: Download; Connector; Importing PDFs; Word; Google Docs; and more; the videos also available on YouTube.

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.

Mendeley is a free citation manager and academic social network with web-based, desktop, and mobile versions. Works with Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, and BibTeX. The most up to date tips and help are on Mendeley's website.

• Introduces social networking tools to collaborate with fellow researchers, including sharing lists of references and collaborative tagging of documents
• Add PDFs to your citation library
• Annotate PDFs
• Search within the text of all of your PDFs
• Sync your library across multiple devices
• UC Berkeley Mendeley users gain access to Mendeley Institutional Edition by accessing Mendeley via 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 Mendeley Institutional Edition for 12 months.
• IMPORTANT: Mendeley's Cite festure does not work with the free Office 365 version of Word offered by UC Berkeley. If you use this version of Word, you will need to use a different reference manager. Unlikely this situation will change.

Mendeley Overview: the basics of downloading and using Mendeley. And for more help, see their help guides.

Also see a Mendeley guide.

EndNote is a client-based program, which means the software resides on your computer and is not accessible via the Internet (but you can sync with the web-based version). The most up to date tips and help are on EndNote's website. EndNote features include:

• The most comprehensive array of citation output styles.
• Client software installed on your computer (can sync with a limited web-based version).
• Linking EndNote records to PDFs and other types of documents saved on your hard drive.
• Can add figures and tables to your EndNote library.
• Use "Find Full Text" to find article PDFs from within EndNote.
• EndNote software must be purchased and installed onto your computer.
• Can share your EndNote library with others.
• You can download a free 30 day EndNote trial.

EndNote Support, and the EndNote Guide (v.21 | v.20 | v.X9) are the best places to start when you are learning EndNote or have problems.

For a comparison of the differences among the current EndNote version and earlier versions, see their comparison chart.

EndNote Basic, a free web-based version, limits the number of citations you can store, has a limited number of citation styles, and a limited number databases that it's compatible with. UC affiliates, as well as purchasers of EndNote Desktop, also get access to the full EndNote Online.

EndNote Training Calendar, from Clarivate/EndNote.

The tools listed above are the most popular at UC Berkeley, but there are several others available. 

Other citation management tools at use by your UCB colleagues are using include: Sciwheel (formerly F1000 Workspace), Qiqqa, Paperpile, Citationsy, and ReadCube Papers. Google Docs also has a (very limited) citation tool.

Use the open source AnyStyle to parses your bibliographies or lists of references regardless of citation style and and turns them into structured, bibliographic data. This is useful if you have a list of references (eg, in a Word document) and wish to import them to citation management software.