

For a few short years, Mendeley was a major advocate for open access research and collaborative working - all while being provided as a free platform. Mendeley was one of the first citation managers, borne from a London startup in 2008.

I did a lot of research at the start of my PhD on which citation manager to use which I’ll share below!īut First - Don’t Use Mendeley or EndNote All of the options below integrate with the cloud, so you can access your research library from anywhere - and they all allow you to extend this collaboratively, so that your group/co-authors can share reference lists.Ĭitation managers are incredibly powerful tools that I think everyone in academia should be using - I’ve found mine essential for keeping track of papers during my PhD. Most citation managers let you output reference lists to Word or LaTeX, saving you countless hours of trying to insert references into your own publications. Keeping an electronic list of papers lets you search, categorise and tag your entire library of papers. Science has never been bigger - the total global scientific output doubles every nine years - and keeping track of everything can feel impossible at the best of times.

Reading Time: 7 minutes – Updated: January 2022Īs researchers, we get through dozens or even hundreds of papers per year.
