Citation managers such as EndNote Basic (aka EndNote Online), EndNote 20, Zotero, and Mendeley are tools for managing your citations. Among other things, citation managers can help you to:

• Collect and organize your citations
• Format bibliographies and in-text citations for your papers
• Share your citations with others

This guide includes pages with information on how to install and use EndNote Basic, EndNote 21, EndNote 20, Zotero, and Mendeley.

The "best" citation manager will depend on the functions you're looking for in a citation manager.

Each citation manager shares some of the same, basic functions, including, among other things, the ability to:

• Import references
• Create bibliographies
• Attach PDFs to citations
• Share citations
• Install and use Word plugins

However, there are functions that only some citation managers have. The UW Libraries' Comparison Chart provides a comprehensive comparison of the available functions in EndNote Basic, EndNote 20, Zotero, and Mendeley.

Important Note: If you are co-writing a paper as a team (i.e., more than one person will be adding citations to a single document), it is preferable that all team members use the same citation manager for the project.

Image by Megan Rexazin Conde from Pixabay

If you have a UW Madison School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) owned device, you can get EndNote 21 installed by your departmental IT staff. Endnote 21 software is provided under SMPH licensing to be installed on SMPH owned devices only.  For more information on getting Endnote 21 software installed on an SMPH owned device, contact your Departmental IT staff via the link below.

Department Help Desks: https://iit.med.wisc.edu/help/#Department-Help-Desks

Note that this license ONLY applies to SMPH owned devices. It does NOT apply to personal devices, or any other devices that aren't owned by SMPH.