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Citation Tools

Quick guide to online citation organization tools, including RefWorks & Zotero

What Is Mendeley?

Mendeley is a research and citation management tool that helps you collect and organize citations and sources, as well as produce bibliographies in a variety of citation styles. Mendeley lets you work both on your own computer and on the cloud, capturing citations, uploading and annotating PDFs, and sharing your documents with other researchers. The basic version of Mendeley is free; this includes limited online storage and collaboration capabilities. Users can upgrade to the Premium version for more storage and/or to share their libraries with more people.

mobile version of Mendeley is also available for iOS devices (iPhone and iPad).

Note for Fall 2022: Mendeley Reference Manager is replacing Mendeley Desktop, but existing users of Desktop can continue to use it. To upgrade from Desktop to Reference Manager, simply sync your Desktop library; download and install Reference Manager; then sign into Reference Manager using your existing credentials.

Tutorials and guides for the latest version of Mendeley:

Mendeley lets you

  • Capture citations from library databases - with one click!
  • Retrieve citation information for articles in PDF 
  • Store and organize citations
  • Annotate PDF's
  • Format in-text citations
  • Create bibliographies in different citation styles
  • Browse other researchers' document collections

See how Mendeley compares

Here is a comparison chart of how Mendeley stacks up against other citation management software.

Mendeley is great for

  • Storing all your documents, notes, annotations, and citations in one place
  • Collaborating with other researchers
  • Sharing information
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