Introduction to Scholarly Communication: Citation Management

Choose a citation management software appropriate for you.

Create a single folder to house .pdfs of papers with citations in your citation management software. 

Pretty much everyone has felt the pain of putting together a bibliography in conjunction with a term paper.  While the proper citation of sources is crucial to avoid plagiarism and to establish the credibility of your own work, the actual work is frequently tedious. Citation management software is designed to alleviate the most painstaking aspects of developing a bibliography. Citation management software downloads citations from databases using the .ris file format, allows the attachment of files to the citations to keep track of articles, and enables the in-line citation and creation of bibliography in a variety of publication styles. The citation managers all use the file format .ris for download. 

There is also a citation manager called Bibtex that is designed to work with the typesetting software LaTex.  Bibtex is both a citation management tool and a file format. This is frequently used in disciplines that are required to publish advanced mathematics equations in publications. Disciplines such as mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, and statistics frequently use LaTex.  If Bibtex presents an undesirable learning curve, all of the packages listed above can output into Bibtex file format.