Of course, who wants to face charges of plagiarism? Citations are important, they’re just also inefficient. We don’t count this as a very significant strike against the program because it seems unfathomable at present to do very productive research on mobile devices.ĭo you get sick of jotting down the source you’re using, recalling the format of this particular paper, and then tediously compiling all of the sources in alphabetical order at the end? It is not an exaggeration to say that your essay may not take as long as your bibliography, in terms of time invested. No mobile word processing apps support any citation managers. One wonderfully useful function you can do on Android or iOS is scan barcodes on books and have the information sent to your Zotero library.

There are two apps on iOS for viewing your saved items. A special web viewer can be accessed on any mobile platform.

There is a mixed-reviewed app on Android that is being supported by an eager developer for looking at your saved research. You can continue to access the web version of Zotero, but there are no particularly useful apps for saving citations as you browse the web. If you are doing all of your research on mobile, you will be essentially out of luck, however. You can also access all of your citation data on the web.

With other word processors, like Google Docs, you can actually drag and drop citations, but this is a bit clunky and we won’t cover that method here. Zotero also plugs into Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice on all of the aforementioned operating systems. Its browser plugins, which are very useful, work on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari with “bookmarklets” that give you quick citing functionality on other browsers. Zotero works on Windows, Mac, almost all Linux distributions, and on the web. With the advent of a widely available, free citation manager like Zotero, those seem like things of the past.įirst, you want to know whether you’ll be able to use this. You’ve done the legwork, but proving it to your readers seems to take more effort than the writing and searching! Once upon a time, websites like EasyBib or Citation Machine were the cutting edge for people trying to expedite the process. Zotero, the free citation manager for students, teachers, and moreĬiting sources is one of the most tedious parts of research, academic or otherwise.

Best free citation manager for mac