Tech Tools for Faculty and Staff: Research Managers

Research managers are excellent tools to help you collect and organize your research and citations. This email will showcase three that are free to use: Zotero, Mendeley, and Diigo.

Zotero is available for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It integrates with your browser to automatically detect content you can save. Zotero gives you 100MB of free storage and your collection is automatically synced to your online account, so you can access it from any device.

Saving articles and other items to your Zotero collection is as simple as clicking the document symbol that's installed next to your web address bar.

Once an item is in your collection, you can sort it into a folder, add notes and tags, and attach the full text.

Zotero connects with Microsoft Word to pull information from your saved items to create bibliographies and in text citations for you in a variety of citation styles.

The best thing about Zotero is that it works well with all content types. It’s designed to work with a variety of database, websites, library catalogs etc. If your work is not limited to only article PDFs, then Zotero is probably the best free option for you.

Mendeley works with all browsers and devices. It's available only as a standalone desktop client, but it does sync with your online account, so you can access your saved items online.

Mendeley doesn't integrate into your browser like Zotero, but you can install a web importer to add items. It doesn't work as well as Zotero's, particularly with pulling article information from databases, so you may have to manually add/correct an item's details after importing it.

Mendeley is designed to work mainly with PDFs, so the best way to input articles is to download the full text PDF first and then drag and drop it into Mendeley or use the "Add Files" button. This way, Mendeley pulls the correct article information from the PDF. You can then open the PDF in Mendeley to add notes, tags, and highlight the text.

Like Zotero, Mendeley connects with Microsoft Word to create bibliographic and in text citations for you.

Mendeley might be your best option if you primarily work with PDFs. It’s also great if you frequently collaborate with others, as Mendeley is marketed as an academic social network. You can create research groups to share your collection with colleauges and allow for group annotating of PDFs. You can also upload and track your own publications.

The Portland State Library has a great guide comparing Mendeley and Zotero to help you choose the best option for your needs: http://guides.library.pdx.edu/c.php?g=271258&p=1811346

Diigo is not necessarily a research manager, but a free social bookmarking and personal information management tool. You can bookmark webpages, tag and organize them, and share them with friends, colleagues, or your students. Diigo works with all browsers and devices.

After creating your account, you'll need to add the Diigolet button to your bookmarks bar. This is available under Tools.

To save webpages, click the Diigolet button to open up Diigo tools where you can select to bookmark the page, highlight it, and add notes and tags to it.

Bookmarks are saved in your Diigo account library that you can access online from any device.

From your library, you can sort items by tags and see your notes and highlighted sections.