Graduate Student Research Support

A citation management system is a tool that can be integrated into your reading and writing workflow. This type of tool allows you to develop a citation library and organize it any way you like. You can import or add citations to the system, develop folder structures, add additional notes or tags to each citation record, link to the readings hosted online or in a cloud-based storage system, and create reference lists in different formatting styles.

The systems are quite flexible in that you can organize things in a way that makes sense to you. Perhaps you want to organize readings by course or topic. You can add subtopic folders, create a shared group library, and find crowdsourced citation libraries on a given topic. You can add tags to each entry - perhaps tagging the entry with the study's methodology, or theory/framework, or themes - that will allow you to sort the citations in a different way. And then you can generate in-text citations and a reference list in your discipline's standard style, or change the style of the list for a journal you are submitting to.

There are several different tools: RefWorks, EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, and more. They all essentially function in the same way. We'll use Zotero here because it's an open source tool. There is a comparison chart at the bottom of this page.

The most important thing to remember is using Citation Management tools is a habit, and the sooner you integrate it into your workflow, the easier it will be to stay organized.

Recorded in November 2024.

Reading Smart: Seamlessly Manage Your PDFs and Notes with Zotero, is the first workshop in the series Read to Write: Your Grad Success Stater Series. This series, co-hosted by UC Irvine Libraries and the Graduate Writing Hub at The Writing Center in fall 2024, focuses on developing helpful habits, workflows, and processes to create an infrastructure for scholarship. It was developed based on common questions or issues we encounter working with graduate students, especially as they begin to think about building a scholarly library of works important to their field of study.

Recorded in October 2024.

Check out the second workshop in this series: