As we all know, managing citations during a project is essential to staying organized and streamlining your research project. There are a variety of tools out there to manage citations but some have better features than others. We have been supporting Endnote's free version through the library for the last several years.
However, Endnote's free version has been relabeled "Endnote Online Classic" and Clarivate, Endnote's parent company, seems to be pushing the paid version and we are concerned that they will eventually stop supporting Endnote Online. The current version of Endnote has a feature called "Cite While you Write" which connects as a plugin to help insert and format in-text citations. While this tool is powerful, it only works with versions of Word downloaded on your computer. This means it doesn't work with Google Docs or other cloud based word processors. With the large movement toward cloud based solutions (Google products on this campus) this makes the plugin much less useful. The free version also has limits on sharing between accounts.
Because of these issues, we've made the decision to begin to support Zotero, which is an open source citation management system with a long history and a great community of users and documentation. Zotero has all the same features as Endnote and has a plugin which works with Google Docs and Office 365. It also has a browser extension that allows for easier capturing of citation information from webpages. Zotero is free and includes 300 MB of storage but if you'd like to upgrade to have additional storage for PDFs and documentation, the pricing is reasonable. As of this writing the pricing structure is as follows: 2 GB is $20/year, 6 GB is $60/year, and unlimited storage is $120/year. We have been hosting some Intro to Zotero webinars as well as providing one-on-one support for those who need it. If you'd like help learning to use Zotero or exporting your current collections out of Endnote we're happy to meet with you.
Find more information about Zotero on our Citation Tools guide.
University of Michigan-Flint
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