Preventing Plagiarism II - Reference and Citation Managers (Brief Overview)

Reference and Citation Managers

So, understanding plagiarism and how software like Turnitin can spot plagiarism, I think it is important to talk about references and citations to some extent so that you can give credit to the proper person when referencing his or her work. This post will discuss some different citation managers like RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley. I will even provide a resource where, if you choose to manually manage your references, will help you make sure the reference is in the proper format.

What is a citation manager?

A citation manager is a software that helps you keep track of articles and books when you come across them during your research. It allows you to group them by paper, project, or year, and easily produces bibliographies in the proper formatting a paper may require. These services are not free but are often provided to students for free by most universities through their library subscriptions.

How do they work?

Using RefWorks as an example, I cannot imagine the other three major software being too different, I will try to show you how these citation managers work. Sometimes, if you've never used it, you will need to download a plug-in to make sure the citation will be able to export directly into your RefWorks account. Once this is done, you will login to your account and leave it in the background, while you peruse the internet for whatever you are researching. Most scholarly resources, that are found through journals or Google scholar, have the ability to export a citation to RefWorks as soon as you look at the source. In these cases, you will export the citation and the source will be uploaded directly to your RefWorks account. If this option isn't available, then you also have the ability to enter information from a given source into RefWorks and it even provides details on how to enter the information so the bibliography will be able to be formatted into the desired format. There are some free citation managers like EasyBib but you must be careful as those managers have been criticized for producing citations in the wrong format.


If you choose to manually enter citations, the following link will provide very in-depth details about how to cite, in text and bibliography style, in many different writing forms. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/


For a more thorough explanation of these citation managers and a breakdown of all the major citation managers please visit http://www.library.wisc.edu/services/citation-managers/comparison-chart/


I have used both of these methods and I'll say that once I used RefWorks to manage my citations, I have never used the manual form or any other form of citation management since.