RefWorks

New Year’s Resolution to Improve Your Citation Management Skills? We’ve Got You Covered

Start your 2019 research off on the right foot with our January series of workshops and webinars! Learn the basics or focus on specific tools to help you manage citations for yourself or your research group.

Registration is now open for ten different workshops. Choose from EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, or Mendeley, or a session that introduces all of them to help you choose one.

What exactly is citation management? you may be asking.   

Summed up, it’s a clever way to create an automatic list of references (aka bibliography). Instead of spending hours typing and arranging your reference list, you can export book and article information into a program that will autoformat it. You’ll decide on your citation style, decide on placement of your in-text references in the text, and then proofread and edit. It’s generally much quicker than entering all the information by hand into your document.

Building a shared citation library for a group project or with research collaborators? Online citation management tools can help you do that, too.

Librarians at Snell Library are available—by phone, email, in person, and by video chat—to help you use these tools. Sign up for a workshop today!

New: RefWorks! Collect Citations and Auto-Format Bibliographies

Now you can automatically create bibliographies in three simple steps! After creating an account on the RefWorks website, collect all your research citations in one place, and then use the RefWorks program to automatically create citations and format bibliographies in your papers. You can access your RefWorks account from any computer connected to the internet, and you can even keep your RefWorks account as an alumnus. (1) Start by making an account on the RefWorks website. (2) Next, as you do research, use library database features or the RefWorks browser plugin to automatically send citations to your RefWorks account. (3) Finally, use the RefWorks Microsoft Word plugin to create citations and bibliographies for your paper. (Mac Pages users can use a slightly different process outlined here.) To learn more about using the program, see the RefWorks company’s series of tutorials here. And don’t forget, Northeastern University also provides a subscription to EndNote. Which one should I use? In general, RefWorks is better for undergraduates and researchers needing to share references, while EndNote has a higher learning curve but more features and is better for graduate students, faculty, and staff involved in deep research projects. For more information, see our in-depth comparison chart. Contact us if you need help with RefWorks or EndNote!