Information Services

Refworks

The University has chosen to purchase RefWorks as its standard reference management software and support for it is provided by the Library at Queen's.

Reference Management Software

Reference management (also called bibliographic management or citation management) software saves you a great deal of time and effort when you are writing a paper, dissertation or thesis. It enables you to store the references you collect while searching the literature and will automatically format the citations in a Word document and produce a list of references at the end of that document. There are lots of packages to choose from: some require a subscription and some are free.  RefWorks requires a subscription but is free to Queen's staff, students and alumni because the subscription is paid by the University. Zotero, Mendeley and Qiqqa are free packages. A number of websites provide detailed comparisons of RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley and Qiqqa including:

Mendeley and Qiqqa differ slightly from RefWorks and Zotero because the emphasis is on the management of full-text pdf documents rather than references. You can also use Mendeley and Qiqqa to annotate PDFs.