Counseling - Marriage & Family Therapy: Reference Managers: Getting Started

Reference management tools/programs save you time and frustration with any writing project where you are gathering references.  They are also useful for monitoring the literature in your field of research, and they make it possible for you to easily share your research.

Reference management tools allow you to:

• Import reference from an online database, a library catalog, and from PDFs.
• Organize your references into a searchable database.
• Generate lists of references to share with colleagues.
• Create formatted bibliographies.
• Insert citations and footnotes into documents.

With so many reference management programs available to us, it can be difficult to decide which one you want to use.  This chart highlights some of the features of the more popular tools.

Cost	Free	Free	Free	$3/mo students $5/mo faculty
Operating  System	Online	Desktop software for Windows or Mac; can be synced with web account	Desktop software for Windows or Mac; or embedded in Firefox	Online
Ease of Use	Easy	Easy	Easy	Moderate
Import Citations from Databases
Attach PDFs
Annotate PDFs
Major Citation Styles
Free Online Storage	2,000 MB	2,000 MB	300 MB	n/a
Sharing Options	Share groups	Free for up to 3 people	Create group	Create shared collection
Automatically Create Citation from PDF
Compatibility	Microsoft Word	Microsoft Word, Open Office	Microsoft Word, Open Office, Google Docs	Microsoft Word, Open Office, Pages
Best for...	Ease of use, group work, use if common citation styles	PDF management, academic social networking	Group work, capturing different types of references (websites, etc.)	PDF management, collaboration with other Papers users