A reference manager pulls the information for citations (or references) from articles, chapters, books, etc. that you read. When you read the “perfect paper” three months and 100 articles ago, they can save you time and agony. Most reference managers also allow you to save PDFs and annotate them for future use, as well as organize references into folders or tagged groups. Which reference manager you use is a personal choice, but the “Big Three” are Endnote, Mendeley, and Zotero.

Often, you’ll download a web plugin for the manager you like to use, which will autopopulate specific citation fields for articles that you select. That said, it is recommended that when you enter an article/chapter/whatever into your reference manager you take the extra time to check the autopopulated information. Sometimes they’ll do funky things, like take the title as the journal name, which can make searching for it later a hassle.

  • Zotero
    • Open source
    • Lots of plugins
  • Mendeley
    • Owned by Elsevier (take that as you will)
    • Lots of plugins (but doesn’t play well with others)
  • Endnote ($$$)
    • Costs money
    • Lots of plugins (works well with Word)
  • Quasi-Endnote
    • Requires you to download the citation files from every article you care about and upload them to a website
    • Good for collaborating with people that use Endnote to format their work
  • RefWorks
    • Schools tend to have licenses
  • JabRef
    • Open source
    • Good for converting between file formats
  • Paperpile ($)
    • Cheap
    • Works with Google Docs
  • Qiqqa
    • 2 GB free storage
    • Not for Macs or Linux without a mirror

Finding References

Now that you know where to store references, let’s talk about how to find them. There’s several great places to search for literature.

The one that’s probably the easiest to use, based on familiarity, is Google Scholar. Google Scholar can also search through patents and government documents in specific year ranges.

For chemistry, there’s also products from the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). SciFinder and SciFindern are great search engines for the field.

Pre-printed articles (available before the peer-review process and full acceptance to a journal) are submitted to field-based archives.

  • arXiv: physics, math, computer science, engineering, economics, etc.
  • ChemRxiv: chemistry
  • BioRxiv: biology, clinical trials, neuroscience, etc.
  • PsyArXiv: psychological science

Some others include:

Also, don’t neglect your local or university library. These have access to many publications, and librarians are fantastic at helping you search for technical information. Most often subscribe to their own search engines, like EBSCOhost and JSTOR.

Paywalled Articles

Published articles are not free to access. That can be very sad.

Unpaywall is a web extension that will search for freely accessible, legal copies of articles hidden behind a paywall. Several government grants require freely accessible copies somewhere, but that often is not on the publisher’s website.

If Unpaywall can’t find it, you’re not out of luck. Next, search your library. Libraries have access to a large number of texts through “Inter-Library Loans” (ILL). It may take a few weeks, but you can often get the publications you need.

Authors are often allowed to distribute their work that has been published. So, you’re encouraged to email the corresponding author (you may need to do some digging for their current email if it was published several years ago) asking for a copy of that publication. They’re not obligated to respond, but most people are thrilled to be asked because (a) you’re interested in their work (!!!) and (b) they might get a citation out of it.

Subject: Published Work Inquiry
Hello Professor X,

I am a [high school teacher, student, researcher, person who thought the title
was cool] and I stumbled upon your work "Insert Title of Work Here" in
[location of work in italics here].

I do not have access to this publication and was wondering if you would be able
to send me a copy.

[Perhaps insert a few sentences of context about why this text might be helpful
(e.g., I do research with these kinds of solar cells).]

Sincerely,

Person Y