Latif Anshori Kurniawan

Organize the Citations

Diterbitkan pada dalam Blog.

In the Name of Allah, The Most Merciful, The Bestower of Mercy.

All praise is due to Allah, many tools have been released for researchers or academias to cite other sources for references these days. Some popular citation software are available on the Net, mostly free of use. You have many options to choose an app to manage your cited stuffs: EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley, etc. For more details, please visit Wikipedia for their comparison (details on citation styles, work on various platforms [desktop, mobile, web-app, others], integration with word processors via plug-ins or extensions, capabilities for import & export, and many more).

Those citations let you to manage many things. You can add your citations from various databases too, e.g.: Web of Science, popular PubMed, and others. Organize the citations also easily to do, you can connect them with your own local databases, even you can do a synchronization to cloud. Do not be worry for your PDF files, you can add them as references whenever you want to.

I will not explain all of the tools, just several well-known of them and mostly used by the majority of researches around the Globe today. Here just for few explanations for EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, and Mendeley (note: this alphabetically order is not about recommendation, but just for easy reading flow). So, I start for EndNote.

EndNote is a software by Clarivate Analytics. It is a client-based desktop app. By means, you can access and manage your citations on your own local Mac hard-drives. You can share your its library to others. It must be purchased, but the price is worthy, you can take many benefits of it. For more download information, you can visit this page. It is available for your iPad on the App Store.

Clarivate Analytics has EndNote, other organization with the same spirit, such as ProQuest, has RefWorks. But, RefWorks is not an app or computational program, but they serve for your bibliography needs.

RefWorks is not available as an app, you should installing Write-N-Cite firstly if you want to use it on your Mac. After you install it, then you can use the RefWorks services. As an alternative, you can use One Line/Cite View. For reminder, you should always verify the output of RefWorks matches the latest requirement of the style when formatting your paper.

RefWorks, just may be, quite popular. It is an old-school services in the citation world. Seems like common tools, it also can be used on your suite Word. RefWorks is cloud-based and good for collaborative projects in your institution.

Happily ever after for open-source community, you have Zotero. Yes, Zotero is a citation open-source software. Its function seems like others, from syncing your computer storage to Zotero Sync Server. Because it is an open-source one, you can work with your LibreOffice—a famous open-source office software; awesome. The Mac version runs well—walhamdulillah.

The last (but not least) for this post is Mendeley. It is a free citation manager and growing popularly at current. It works fantastically like an academic social network. It provides on common platforms, like desktop & mobile. Not only available for Word or LibreOffice, but it also supports for BibTex. Likes any other apps, Mendeley organizes your PDFs and synchs your own libraries across multiple platforms. Sure, it is available for your Mac too—maa shaa’ Allah.

I also mentioned other citation services on the Tools page of this blog—hope this page is useful for you. Wallahu A’lam. Have you use one of them? Have you use all of them? Please drop us a line.

May Allah Grant us Tawfeeq! Baarakallahu feekum.