Digital and social media tools

When undertaking a longer project or dissertation, you may wish to consider how to manage all of the research references that you collect during your work. This can be a challenge, especially if you have many references, so you may wish to use reference management to assist you with this. Examples of some of these tools are given below, but you may wish to find out what is used in your department or by your supervisors/colleagues.

City St George's subscribes to RefWorks and makes it available to staff, students and alumni. Some of the products, such as EndNote and Mendeley, currently have free versions; see the providers' websites for further details.

RefWorks is an online reference management, writing, and collaboration tool designed to help researchers at all levels gather, organise, store and share all types of information and to generate citations and bibliographies. Please remember to check any output generated by RefWorks for accuracy.

You must create a new account the first time you use RefWorks.

Use RefWorks to:

• Manage and store your references from projects and dissertations in folders
• Export references from Library Search, databases and Google Scholar, etc.
• Create and format bibliographies in different styles and generate in-text citations
• Save PDFs and documents
• Collaborate and share references with others.

See our RefWorks guide for more information.

EndNote is a reference management software that allows you to collect, store and manage bibliographic references. You can then include them in your academic writing and automatically create a bibliography in the referencing style of your choice.

The University has some EndNote Desktop licences; academic staff wishing to have it installed on their computer should contact IT Services.

See the Clarivate Analytics Endnote training web page.

 
Mendeley is a free tool enabling you to capture, organise, annotate, store and share your references. You can download a desktop version, including a plug-in for Word to enable you to create citations and bibliographies. You can also access the online version and synchronise your accounts so that you can easily access your chosen papers at any point. Versions are also available for iPhone/iPad. Mendeley Desktop has been discontinued since September 2022, but users who had already downloaded it may be able to access it. 

The desktop version enables you to easily upload any PDFs you may have already downloaded into your files.

The online interface enables you to connect with like-minded researchers, to join and form groups and networks and to discover and share papers. You can develop and display your academic profile to include your papers, CV, etc. You can see how many times your papers have been read and view discussions generated by your research. You can choose to embed this profile in other websites e.g. on your blog.

 
Zotero is a free reference management software. It allows you to:

• Collect bibliographic information (extracts metadata) on books, journal articles, videos and other resources from library resources, databases and free sites.
• Collect PDFs, files and images for each citation/reference in your library.
• Create a bibliography and in-text citations in a variety of reference styles in a Word or OpenOffice document.
• Sync between computers and the cloud.
• Create Groups to share citations, collections, notes and tags with colleagues.