Organize Your Research and Writing with Reference Management Tools

Students: Writing a paper for a WE or RWE course?  Planning to participate in the joint journal competition after classes end?  In your writing you will be citing to scholarly sources as well as primary law. Depending on how robust your footnotes are you may feel overwhelmed with managing all your references. As you probably know from your studies prior to law school reference and citation management tools can help keep your research and writing process organized and efficient. This blog post provides some suggestions for citation management tools that have gotten positive reviews from users. The most common tools in the citation management world are Zotero, RefWorks, EndNote, and Mendeley.  Although they all provide the same overarching service (i.e. a way to help organize your research) small differences between the tools give users the opportunity to select the most appropriate tool for their needs. For instance, Zotero and RefWorks allow users to tag items. Organizing citations with tags can help streamline searching especially with large collections of citations. The Penn State University Libraries have put together a guide comparing the features of these tools.

The abovementioned tools are certainly not the only ones available. New tools pop up all the time. Here are some lesser known—and free—citation managers that may be worth exploring. Citavi is a program made for Windows-based systems. On top of providing reference management capabilities, Citavi also includes task planning resources. This could be useful for students involved in extracurricular activities or anyone juggling multiple deadlines. One limitation is that Citavi allows a maximum of 100 references for its free version. Colwiz is another interface that has gained recent popularity. The tool provides a citation and bibliography generator with over 6,000 styles from which to choose. Colwiz offers three versions of the Bluebook style. But, caveat emptor! You should manually double-check the citation Colwiz produces as these programs are notorious for errors.

Happy researching and writing!