Does it make me “old school” if I still prefer writing out my citations by hand? Citation engines weren’t available when I was in college, and I didn’t need them in my M.F.A. program, but they were ubiquitous in my Ph.D. program. Even so, I didn’t give in until I was preparing for my qualifying exams, and I sort of regret that I didn’t pick and commit to one platform early on.

When my undergraduate students ask me about citation engines, I ask them to outline their “needs model” for me, by answering the following:

• Do I feel confident in my ability to manually cite my sources, either from memory or referring to the appropriate style guide (or resources like Purdue OWL)?
• What do I need the tool to do for me? (Produce accurately formatted citations? Store and organize downloaded articles? Allow me to highlight in articles and write notes, summaries, and manage my research process?)
• How high of a learning curve am I willing to tolerate/am I willing to do any work with the platform at all? (Automatic and easy out of the box? Type in bibliographic information by hand? FAFO?)
• Is it worth it/can I afford to pay for a service, based on the time I have left in higher education and/or my career plans? (Free? Yearly subscription?)

Then, based on their answers, I recommend:

• ZoteroBib – Free online tool for creating bibliographies
• Zotero – Open-source, free software for saving publication data, annotating PDFs, integrating with word processors, and creating bibliographies. (Zotero has been around since 2006, making it a very robust tool, but didn’t have the kinds of features I needed back then, so I never really committed to it myself.)
• Mendeley – Free software for saving publication data, annotating PDFs, integrating with word processors, and creating bibliographies. (I stopped using it when Elsevier bought it.)
• Citavi – Paid German software owned by Lumivero (who also own NVivo). Towards the end of my dissertation process, I ultimately settled on Citavi myself, because in addition to doing what Zotero does I wanted a tool that would help me manage my research tasks and overall workflow, let me taxonomize my annotations, and sync locally and to the cloud. It’s not cheap ($200.00/yearly, which I could not have afforded early in my academic career) and is only compatible with Windows, but it was a game changer for me.

Someday I’ll document how I use Citavi to specifically assist with doing research as a chronically ill scholar. Someday.

Honestly, I still don’t really use these tools for citation formatting so much as for collecting, organizing, and engaging with scholarship⁠—but maybe someday when I finish organizing my massive research repository, I’ll finally give it a shot. Someday. Whenever that is.