Purpose of this guide
This guide is designed to help you create a library for your references, manage them and use them to create bibliographies and in-text citations/footnotes for your papers and research articles using reference management software.
Using Reference Management Tools to enhance your Research Output
Provided by Maynooth University
What is Reference Management Software?
Reference or Citation Management Software allows you to collect references into your own Library saved to your device or online.
You can also add your own notes to the individual references. PDF's can be downloaded, attached to the bibliographic records and annotated. Once they are saved, they can be sorted into groups and formatted into bibliographies in a variety of referencing styles.
A cite while you write tool can also be downloaded which will allow you to create in text citations and footnotes in your papers.
You can also use the software to collaborate with other researchers on your research projects.
Which Reference Management Tool should I use?
Research Support Librarian
Limitations of Reference Management Tools
They may not create a perfect bibliography or reference list according to your preferred style. There may be a departmental version you'll need to adjust it to.
You still need to be familiar with the referencing style to be used, to enable you to spot any errors
Refer to Departmental Style Manuals or check out the resources here Which Referencing Style? - Referencing & Avoiding Plagiarism - LibGuides at National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Typos or errors or omissions from references manually entered or downloaded from databases will not be automatically corrected. For example a article title being in all CAPS.
Proof reading is important for accuracy: punctuation, capitalisation, spelling.
Fields may missing for example reference type (book/conference) may not be picked up correctly.
To make changes just click into the record in your Reference Management Tools Library
