In my undergraduate years I made good use of Endnote, a popular citation manager. It saved substantial time, and as a student with an institutional license, the cost was not an issue. There weren’t many alternatives, and Endnote was the most polished of what was available.

Two problems emerged towards the end of my studies:

• Syncing databases across machines frequently led to corrupted files. I commonly worked on different machines at different locations.
• Continued use without an institutional license incurred hefty subscription fees.

My concern was that going into a postgraduate setting, I’d either lose access to my data or be locked into paying for software I’d rarely use.

Zotero

I made the switch to Zotero. Originally developed as a Firefox extension, it now has standalone clients and browser connectors for most major browsers.

It is a powerful citation manager and adjusting to it was intuitive. It is free, so there’s no concern about losing access without an institutional license.

Particularly useful features:

• Sync across different computers is well integrated and works well for group collaboration
• You can use your own online storage via WebDAV for attachments (covered in a separate post)
• Native cross-platform support. I’ve since switched to Linux for my work computer
• Excellent metadata retrieval for PDFs. If you have a folder of randomly named PDFs, Zotero can look at them, fetch citation details, and rename the files automatically

Browser-based citation capture works well for metadata, though attachments can be hit and miss when going through university proxy systems.

Integration with word processors

Zotero has dedicated plugins for Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer. Community-built plugins cover other productivity suites, and solutions exist for otherwise unsupported platforms like Google Docs via RTF/ODF-Scan.

After a year of regular use, Zotero is a stable and mature piece of referencing software. I’d recommend it without hesitation.