What is a citation manager? A citation manager helps you organize the resources that you have found into one place. With a citation manager you can:
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import citation information from databases and other sources, such as webpages
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organize your citations and pdfs to make them easier to find again
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save .pdfs alongside their citation information
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format your citations in a particular style and incorporate those citations easily in your paper
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take notes and include them alongside citations
Refworks
Refworks is just one citation manager that you can use to import references into. You can organize sources into folders to make them easier to find and you can format your sources into 100 citation styles. There is a tool to use that can grab citation information from webpages and a tool for Word to import citations into your paper as your writing and to help create your bibliography page. You should always check your citations to make sure that they are correct.
***Just a word of caution, sometimes, Refworks doesn't play well with MACs.
Mendeley
Mendeley is free citation management system, but it also includes social networking features. It is sponsored by Elsevier, one of the largest scientific publishing companies in the world. This means that it's designed for researchers to discover and download journal articles and resources, organize them, read and annotate PDFs, create in-text references and bibliographies, and collaborate with other researchers. It also has tools to grab the citations off webpages and to use in Word to put your citation information the paper you're writing.
***This citation manager DOES work well when on MACs
MendeleyHere is the link to get to Mendeley. Just sign up for a free account.
Mendeley TutorialHere are some tutorial videos produced by Mendeley to help get you started.