Guides
Wayfinders for our collections, tools, and servicesPWR: Rhetorics of Health, Illness, and Medicine: Manage your citations
What is a citation manager?
When you start finding relevant and interesting research publications, you'll want an easy way to store and access the citations. That way you can quickly refer back to them and cite them in your own publications. Citation managers help you save, organize, and share citations. Citation managers also allow you to generate lists of references and inline citations automatically.
Pick a citation manager
Developed by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, a nonprofit organization, Zotero follows a freemium model. Zotero offers 300 MG of storage space for free and additional storage space for a subscription fee. Zotero allows you to:
- use their web app
and desktop app - store citations and documents
- save references directly from the web with browser plug-ins
- cite as you write with MS Word plug-in and Google Docs plug-in
- tag documents
- share private folders and public folders
Developed by ProQuest, RefWorks is a web-based citation manager that requires an institutional liscense. Stanford Libraries maintains an institutional license for Stanford. If you are new to RefWorks, then you will want to start with the new RefWorks and use your Stanford email to create an account. The new RefWorks allows you to:
- use their web app
- store citations and documents
- save references directly from the web with browser plug-ins
- cite as you write with MS Word plug-in and Google Docs plug-in
- tag and annotate documents
- share private folders and public folders
- use unlimited storage due to our site license
Developed by Elsevier, a for-profit academic publisher, Mendeley also follows a freemium model. Mendeley offers 2GB of storage space for free and additional storage space for a subscription fee. Mendeley allows you to:
- use their web app and desktop app
- store citations and documents
- save references directly from the web with browser plug-ins
- cite as you write with MS Word plug-in
- tag documents and annotate documents
- share private and public folders
Developed by Clarivate Analytics, a for-profit company, EndNote offers a free web app (EndNote basic) and a desktop app (EndNote X9) that requires a one-time purchase. EndNote allows users to:
- use their web app and desktop app (desktop app requires EndNote X9)
- store citations and documents (document storage requires EndNote X9)
- save references directly from the web with browser plug-ins
- cite as you write with MS Word plug-in
- share private folders
- easily save references from Web of Science