When you click this button, it creates an entry for you and populates it with the correct information. The “Automatically Capture Bibliographic Information From The Web” button (it doesn’t have a name in the Zotero documentation) appears on pages like ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Amazon, where information about references is displayed. Then, I heard that there was a plugin to Microsoft Word that helped you manage references. I had actually heard of Zotero about the same time I acquired Mendeley (thanks Neil!), but I hadn’t ever bothered to figure it out. I began to search for something more robust. It was also not recognizing conference papers as such, often leaving them as the default “Article”. When it was given the paper’s title, it was often filling in the journal with “Society” or something ridiculous like that. I’ve also been experiencing issues with it recently of it not quite finding the right information based on a search of the title. However, the program is big, slow, and uses tons of screen space. You can also share groups of citations with others – great when you’re surveying literature. It is a closed-source program that has an online web presence and a sync server, meaning that once you put your papers into the software, it can display them for you on the web, or sync them onto a new computer. My choice for about the past year was Mendeley. Mendeley is a free cross-platform solution that can scan PDF files and automatically fill in a citation with data online. Papers is an award-winning paper management program for Mac OS X.

Endnote is a relatively long-standing program that is known for providing citation management to Word. There’s actually no lack of citation managers out there. This led me on a quest to find a slightly better reference management system. There are also a number of references that simply aren’t on the digital library and have taken a bit of effort to acquire, so I’d rather not lose them. I also need files so I can transfer them to my iPad and iPhone. I can use Spotlight (rather than Google) to look for files on my hard drive. One may wonder – why keep files at all? Can’t you just grab them from the ACM Digital Library when you need them?

You have to often add them manually to each entry, and it doesn’t keep them organized nicely on the file system. One of the limitations of BibDesk is that it doesn’t handle files very well. It’s extremely lightweight, stores data in BibTeX format, and is quite portable across systems. Right now, I use BibDesk for much of my reference management. One thing that I like about LaTeX is that its citation management is quite good – it’s easy to add references, move them around, and have the Bibliography build properly.

Use zotero with word for mac 2016