What is citation management software?

A reference manager supports researchers in performing three basic research steps: searching, storing, and writing [...]. It helps researchers find relevant literature, allows them to store papers and their bibliographic metadata in a personal database for later retrieval, and allows researchers to insert citations and references in a chosen citation style when writing a text.¹

Citation managers can save researchers a lot of time, help reduce mistakes, and help avoid plagiarism. For those reasons, they are highly recommended.

Click here for a comparison of different citation managers.

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¹Fenner, Martin, Kaja Scheliga, and Sönke Bartling. ‘Reference Management’. In Opening Science, edited by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike, 125–37. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_8.