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APA Style Guide: Citation managers

Created by Health Science Librarians

Building a citation in APA

To get one citation in APA, you can often find the information using the Cite button in a database.  Be sure to check that these citations are correct APA format. 

UNC also offers a citation builder with which you can manually create your citation: https://library.unc.edu/citationbuilder/

What citation managers do the University Libraries support?

Don't know which reference manager to choose?

Endnote is great for in-depth research projects like systematic reviews, but an EndNote license costs $108 with our UNC discount.  Endnote has customizable duplicate searching so you can remove more duplicates.  It also has a Find Full Text feature that attempts to automatically download the PDFs of articles you select.  Endnote also connects with Word to cite while you are writing. You can also download nearly 6,000 custom output styles for any citation style your field uses. You can also use a free, web-based version called EndNote Basic.

SciWheel is a web-based alternative that is easy to use and has a browser plugin to grab citations from the web.  It connects with Word to cite while you are writing.  You can also import PDFs and SciWheel will create a citation for them.

Zotero is another free citation management tool with similar features to SciWheel or Mendeley.  At this time, HSL only offers one-on-one support for Zotero.

Mendeley is another free software you may have heard of that has similar features to SciWheel.  Mendeley is less consistent with providing you links to the full articles, however.  Our library does not provide technical support for Mendeley.

We have an in-depth comparison chart below and tips for switching citation managers on our Choosing a Citation Manager guide.

Comparing reference managers

  EndNote
(Desktop)
Zotero Sciwheel (formerly F1000Workspace)
HSL Online Guides EndNote Zotero Sciwheel (formerly F1000Workspace)
Classes at HSL EndNote Classes   Sciwheel Classes
Cost $108 for students, faculty, & staff through UNC-CH
 
Zotero is free Free through UNC-CH
Notes See EndNote Basic guide for further details on the free online version   Use this link to create account.  Select No, I'm a new user then select password.
How is it used? Computer
+ Web
Computer
+ Web
Web
Major citation styles?
Annotation of PDFs
Locate full-text using UNC-CH subscriptions
Instructions for EndNote

Instructions for Zotero

Instructions for Sciwheel
Adds citation from a PDF
Sharing options X7 and above users have sharing options / email compressed libraries See group options here
 
Share unlimited projects and manuscripts
Free online storage EN21- three year access to EndNote Web with unlimited storage 700+ papers
(more space can be purchased)
Unlimited
Word Processor Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word
Google Docs
LibreOffice (all)

Microsoft Word
Google Docs
Manuscripts for Mac