Zotero

Any student (of any subject and from any institution, whether it be a school or a university) may wish to install Zotero on their computer. It's a completely (and I mean completely, there isn't even anything they advertise that costs you a dime that I've seen so far, at least) free bibliography manager that has plugins for Chrome, Firefox (in fact it can be run by itself in Firefox) and Safari which means you can save references by merely clicking a button in your respective web browser (see figure 1 for details). Unfortunately, this plugin, for Chrome, isn't exhaustive, in the list of websites for which it can retrieve bibliographic information. It works for PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon, Wikipedia and most publishers of journal articles and books. I've reviewed the Zotero Wikipedia article for accuracy and from what I can tell it is accurate and might answer some of your additional questions.

Figure 1: Zotero browser plugin; click the indicated object when you want to save your current page to Zotero

Zotero works on almost  any operating system (Mac OS X, Windows and, even, Linux). To install it on Windows or Mac OS X (I haven't used Mac, myself, so I'm guessing here) just download the file at this link and then double-click the downloaded file. For Ubuntu Linux just run these commands in the Terminal

wget https://raw.github.com/smathot/zotero_installer/master/zotero_installer.sh -O /tmp/zotero_installer.sh
chmod +x /tmp/zotero_installer.sh
sudo /tmp/zotero_installer.sh

 It can create references in any (and I mean any, as you can even customise a particular reference style in its database to suite your particular preferences; you can edit it here. If you'd like some help editing it this way, just send me a email me and I should get back to you soon. I've even customised it to use Wikipedia's default referencing style (if you'd like some examples of the style I mean see this page.) style, including:

• American Psychological Association (APA) style
• American Medical Association (AMA) style
• Vancouver style
• Harvard style
• Cell style
• Modern Language Association (MLA) style
• Chicago Manual of Style style
• Nature style
• IEEE style

all of which, except AMA style, are default styles that are built-into Zotero as soon as you install it. You can find a comprehensive list of styles it can utilise here. Last time I checked the number of styles they had available was nearing 7,000. All of these styles are completely free, by the way! To install a style all you do is double click the file you downloaded from the website I gave (although I should mention this only works for Windows and maybe Mac OS X), or if you're in Ubuntu just move the CSL style file to /home/YOURUSERNAME/.zotero/zotero/c1ogs4nc.default/zotero/styles (replacing the "YOURUSERNAME" with your username) and restart Zotero. If you'd like a terminal code for this in Ubuntu, here it is:

sudo mv /home/YOURUSERNAME/Downloads/STYLE-NAME.csl /home/YOURUSERNAME/.zotero/zotero/c1ogs4nc.default/zotero/styles

Where the capitalised parts of the code are for you to fill out according to the style's name
or your username. (Note: this code is assuming you've got your browser to download all your files to your Downloads directory).

When you've stored your references into Zotero and want to export them, well you can get a plug-in for LibreOffice or Microsoft Office, but I personally prefer the old fashion way, by following these instructions (see figure 2).

Figure 3: First step to creating a bibliography

Figure 3: Select the style you want from the scrollable menu; then set the "Output Mode" to "Bibliography". Then select "Copy to Clipboard" for output method. Then click "OK". Then press "Ctrl+V" to insert your bibliography into anything document you're working on.