When working on extensive research projects, you will need to collect, organize and format all the various materials (articles, books etc.) that will be used in the final project. 

Citation Managers are tools that help you keep track of, and organize, this personal research library. They allow you to:

• Capture and store references as you search library databases, google, and save PDFs
• Re-find those references by searching your own collection
• Make notes about those references
• Integrate with MS Word to quickly create in-text citations and bibliographies in the style that you need (thousands of styles are available!)

Learning a specific citation manager is an investment of time, but it will pay off in the long run!

Below are basic how-to guides for the citation managers we support at Penn State.

Penn State also has access to a "lite" version of Refworks, but it is not recommended because of a lack of the advanced functionality needed by graduate students and researchers.