What is your favorite citation manager and why?

[PsyDr]

Endnote? Mendeley? Zotero?

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[szymk1sm]

I used EndNote in grad school and enjoyed it (but haven't used in probably 7 years now so not sure about new features - and you have to pay for it). I started using Mendeley in my current position b/c it was free and recently switched to Zotero due to needing a feature for NIH grant formatting that wasn't easily accessible in Mendeley (or at least it wasn't clear to me on how to do it). Of all 3 - I preferred Mendeley (at least the app version - I didn't use the online one). Zotero has been a learning curve in some ways with the formatting, but I really like the web browser connector that auto-imports the citation into the manager.

 

[RxPsych]

Zotero has been a game-changer for my dissertation. Funny enough, I didn't even use a citation manager until about 2 years ago. Didn't know they existed and I was typing and formatting all my references the old school way.

 

[Ollie123]

Endnote for no better reason than it works and it is tough to prioritize learning a new one. I don't love it.

Same with SPSS. I've been meaning to shift to exclusive use of R for...10+ years now? Yet 95% of the time "Oh, I'll just knock it out faster in SPSS. I don't have time to be analyzing data anyways." Rinse/repeat.

 

[quickpsych]

Throughout school usually used Citation Machine. Only recently heard of Endnote.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

I've usually used Endnote, mostly because I'm familiar with it (I think I started using it for my dissertation). I've heard Zotero is good, but I haven't learned it yet.

 

[R. Matey]

Endnote for no better reason than it works and it is tough to prioritize learning a new one. I don't love it.

Same with SPSS. I've been meaning to shift to exclusive use of R for...10+ years now? Yet 95% of the time "Oh, I'll just knock it out faster in SPSS. I don't have time to be analyzing data anyways." Rinse/repeat.

jamovi may be a good gateway. It has a really nice GUI that's built on the R language. I use it all the time.

 

[Psychai]

I've used endnote, mendeley, and zotero for meta analyses and general citation management. As far as I saw, they have incredibly similar functionality and they're all good options. The main criteria I would use to decide between them is if you have any collaborators that are already using one of them. In my experience they all do very poorly with cross compatibility. Once one of them is integrated with Word on your computer, it can make citation formatting bizarre when you're reviewing a document that was formatted with a different citation manager.

 

[R. Matey]

I've used endnote, mendeley, and zotero for meta analyses and general citation management. As far as I saw, they have incredibly similar functionality and they're all good options. The main criteria I would use to decide between them is if you have any collaborators that are already using one of them. In my experience they all do very poorly with cross compatibility. Once one of them is integrated with Word on your computer, it can make citation formatting bizarre when you're reviewing a document that was formatted with a different citation manager.

This is my experience as well.

 

[Ollie123]

jamovi may be a good gateway. It has a really nice GUI that's built on the R language. I use it all the time.

Thanks, I'll have to play with this.

I do use R some of the time. Do virtually all my plotting in R, my GIS work in R and some non-linear stuff models. Its just a matter of crossing over to "fluency" on the coding front...

 

[romanticscience]

I’ve used readcube (papers) since medical school.

 

[ThatPsyGuy]

Zotero for now. It's what I've always used.

It's open source, so the community has developed plenty of plugins that I can integrate with all my software.

I have an A.I. assistant w/ some other workflow tools that pulls articles (and their pdfs) related to research questions or topics I'm interested from the EBSCO database. It uses what I keep and what I discard to learn more about my preferences for articles.

It pretty much crafts a literature review for me to tweak toward what I need. Then that same tool links it to a relevant notebook in Obisidian so I can keep track of progress, and then even crafts an outline of an article with where to put key topics, intros, etc in APA format in a word processor.

I've now been taking the PDFs that Zotero pulls and have been dragging them into NotebookLM to make a podcast for me just for funsies.

Zotero is neat. But it takes lots of tweaking to get you where you want it to be. I'd like to try out Readcube some day.

 

[albatross_at_crossroads]

Another vote for Zotero. Started because my grad program uses it, but it's been quite helpful. When resubmitting a recent paper, I converted all my references to another format with one click. Having separate "collections" and sub-collections for different projects comes very handy in organizing everything. It also makes cloud backups of everything, and if you pay more for storage you can keep all your pdfs there too. If you don't want to pay, the free version has all functionalities minus this extra storage.