Academic Writing: Citation Managers

Citations managers are used by researchers to

• collect, store and organize citations about a topic
• annotate a citation (or paraphrase or quote from it)
• export citations, annotations or quotes into a Works Cited, bibliography or other format.

There are many citation managers; some require a subscription and many are free. CVHS subscribes to NoodleTools as a good introductory citation manager for high school students. Zotero is another free and robust citation manager that can be used through college. 

What do Citation Managers do?

Citation managers make certain steps in the research process a bit easier.

Gather Citations

Citation managers exchange information about a publication (author, title, volume, issue, page number, url) between a research database and a word processing software. For example, an article found in the Proquest Central Student database is passed to NoodleTools then to Google Docs. 

When you are in a research database like Proquest Central Student and you find an interesting article, there is an option to "Export" a citation to a citation manager like NoodleTools or Zotero. Proquest pushes information about the article (called "RIS metadata") to NoodleTools. NoodleTools grabs the citation metadata and puts it in a folder (or a "Project"). 

Organize and Reformat Citations

Citation managers allow you to group sources into project folders.

Citation managers use a Research Information System (RIS) metadata standard, which is a uniform set of rules to capture things like the author, title, volume, issue and page numbers of a publication. This standard is necessary to clean up and organize citations you may find in multiple databases and other sources so they all look the same when you write your paper.

Notes and Quotes

You can create and store notes and annotations about a source and store them in the citation manager. You can paraphrase key concepts or identify key quotes from the article and store those as well!  

Export Citations

When ready to begin writing, a researcher can (almost magically!) export the citations from the citation manager into a nicely formatted Works Cited. In addition to the RIS metadata standard, citation managers also know the "rules" of the various citation styles such as MLA, APA, Chicago and many more. So, for the most part, the export is well formatted according to publisher-provided information and the association's rules.

The researcher can also export notes and quotes. With some quick editing, the notes and quotes can become the start of a paper!

Citation Managers aren't perfect: common errors

Citation managers do about 85-90% of the job. Review and manually edit your Works Cited once you've exported it from a citation manager. 

Common errors include hanging indentation issues, mixed up authors and contributors, titles with incorrect capitalization, italics and punctuation, titles and containers mixed up (for e-resources), database urls are supplied instead of DOIs or Permalinks when those are available, and url formatting (remove the "https://"). 

FAQs

Do I need to download the full-text as well?

Some citation managers store the full-text of the publication. However, many do not. If you want to keep and refer back to the full-text of an article over time, you may want to download the article as well as the citation and put it in a folder. (This practice will become more helpful when you are in college - or in a high school pathway - where you may study the same subject in depth in multiple classes. As you specialize, you may find really key articles that you want to cite again as you specialize in a field.) 

Do I have to use a citation manager to write a good academic research paper? 

No. It is possible to create your Works Cited and all of your in-text citations manually directly in your word processing software (e.g. Google Docs). Some writers prefer not to use one.

On the other hand, many researchers find it helpful to use a citation manager not only to keep sources and notes organized, but also to refer back to and reuse them in future papers on a similar topic. As you specialize in a field, you will gradually build a collection of secondary literature (interesting articles) that become the foundation of your career.

Also consider, there are other more advanced capabilities in citation managers that you will learn later in college, so it's a good idea to learn these fundamentals now in high school. Check out our video tutorials and workshops for more advanced topics.

Citation Managers Compared

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