The Thompson Library & Archives Blog

Staying on Top of Professional Literature and Citations

The summer months are prime research time for faculty, so we want to highlight a few tools to help you stay on top of your professional literature and track and organize your citations.

Browzine

Instead of subscribing to multiple journal RSS feeds or visiting individual journal websites, create a Browzine account to get email or mobile notifications when new issues are published.

With a Browzine account you can

• Create a custom list of scholarly journals which you can access online or through a mobile app.
• Choose to get notifications when new issues are published.
• Browse tables of content for articles you want to read or download.
• Create lists of articles to read later.
• Download PDFs of articles.
• Share links to articles or export references to citation management tools like Zotero.

UM-Flint Library's Browzine video tutorial

Download from the Apple Store | Download from Google Play

LibKey Nomad

If you are used to searching outside of the Thompson Library either through Google Scholar or going directly to a database like PubMed, LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that will unlock paywalls by connecting you to the library proxy. After downloading the extension, simply select the University of Michigan-Flint as your institution. You then will start to see Libkey Nomad buttons on journal websites, ResearchGate, PubMed, and other sites when full text access is available through the library's subscriptions. Once you click on these buttons, you will automatically be prompted to login to the UM-Flint single sign-on service without navigating away from the article.

Zotero

Zotero is a free, open source citation management system that is a favorite with some of our librarians, though we do not have an institutional subscription. What sets Zotero apart from EndNote is the Zotero Connector browser extension which helps collect citations of digital content and works with cloud-based documents (like Google Docs and Microsoft 365) to insert citations and bibliographies.

It is easy to sign up and download, and it has a robust set of documentation for troubleshooting. There are also payment options to add storage for documents related to your citations.

Use Zotero to

• Create and organize collections of citations,
• Collaborate with colleagues when collecting references with Zotero Groups,
• Insert citations into Microsoft Word for desktop, Microsoft 365 Word, and Google documents with Zotero Connector,
• Create formatted bibliographies in a default 15 styles, though you can add more,
• Switch between citation styles.

Zotero Tutorial Playlist from the Carleton College Gould Library

If you have any questions about these tools or would like help using them, please contact Emily Newberry, Research and Scholarship Librarian, or Liz Svoboda, Instruction and Outreach Librarian.