Did you find documents useful for your thesis, but you saved them here and there?

You don't know what citation format is required for your bibliography and you waste a lot of time trying to make it uniform, or sorting it alphabetically?

Reference managers are just what you need!

These programs allow you to store in a single space, whether on your pc or online, everything that you find interesting during your search (references, but also entire documents with your annotations). The purpose of this software is to make it easier to use data while you are writing, whenever you need them, even after a long time.

For example you can:

• Save a citation from a database, a catalogue or a web site
  

• Automatically create a bibliography

• Change the citation style while the work is in progress, choosing each time the one required
  

• Enrich citations or documents saved with comments and share them with your research group
  

• Save and manage on cloud PDF files, screenshots, graphics, images and other files useful for your researches.

They were meant mainly to handle bibliographies, the reference managers have acquired over time other features, especially those of the social media and the web 2.0. It is currently common, for example, that a reference manager allows you to create shared folders with people who belong to your research group.

At first the different software tended to differ for some special feature: Zotero, for example, was famous for being linked to the browser Firefox and for being able to catch easily bibliographic metadata directly by web sites, Mendeley instead was characterized by its social vocation and by offering a large database of references which has been established over time, based on data collected by the network of scholars who use it all over the world.

Competition and imitation then made sure that each reference manager tried to develop the same features as the competitors. The differences between one and the other are less significant and the choice of using one is often a matter of personal choice.

Before making your choice, some considerations might help you:

• if you start a collaboration with a group of colleagues, ask them if they already use one of these programs to share bibliographies: it will be easier if you adopt the same.
• if you prefer you can also adopt more than one program and take full advantage of everyone's strengths: but first check that the export of data from one to another is easy, so that you will have no surprises once the bibliography has grown!

FEATURE	ENDNOTE BASIC	ZOTERO	MENDELEY	JABREF
INTERACTS DIRECTLY WITH WEBSITES (web-based)	Yes, besides it carries out more controlled searches on a limited number of catalogues, is optimized to dialogue with Web of Science	Yes: it integrates with browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari through a special plug in to be downloaded. Data can be synchronized with an online account	Yes, after adding the plug-in to the browser. Very often data automatically imported are not complete. It can be synchronized with the desktop version of the program.	It has a plug-in for FireFox, it's called Jabfox and can import automatically metadata, usually more complete than those of Mendeley
YOU HAVE GOT TO BE ONLINE TO USE IT	YES	NO	NO	NO
PRICE	The BASIC version is free, the Desktop version requires a fee	The program is free. An additional cost to increase storage space.	The program is free. An additional cost to increase storage space	Free, also because storage is on your computer and not on cloud
IT IS COMPATIBLE WITH WORD PROCESSING PROGRAMS	MS Word	MS Word, Open Office, Google Docs	MS Word, Open Office, LaTex, the plug-in is very well done and perfectly integrates into Word	Yes but the procedure is bit complex
YOU CAN IMPORT FROM DATABASE	YES	YES	YES	YES
IMPORTS REFERENCES FROM WEB	Yes, from menu Download you can get the Capture reference, but metadata are very lacking	Yes, its web-importer is one of the most effective	Yes, but you have got to clean and integrate data	It interfaces with several databases and searches engine including Google Scholar
YOU CAN ATTACH FILES(PDFs, etc.)	YES	Yes, also automatically	Yes, besides you can take notes and share files with your group	YES
CAN SEARCH INTO FULL TEXT OF PDF FILES	NO	YES	YES	NO
CAN CREATE GROUPS OR SHARED FOLDER	YES	YES	YES	YES
YOU CAN CREATE BIBLIOGRAPHIES WITH DIFFERENT CITATION STYLES	YES	YES	YES	YES
YOU CAN CREATE CUSTOMIZED CITATION STYLES	NO	YES	YES	NO
YOU CAN PULL OUT CITATIONS DIRECTLY FROM PDF FILES	NO	YES	YES	YES