Doctor of Social Work (DSW) Research: Citation Management

This guide provides links to resources available at USC Libraries for researchers working in the area of social work.

Organizing Your Research Paper

Check out our research guide, Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper, to help you organize and write a quality research paper for classes taught in the social and behavioral sciences. 

The purpose of this guide is to provide advice on how to develop and organize a research paper in the social sciences.

Purdue OWL Writing Lab is a great resource that provides writing guides and tutorials as well as APA citation guides. Check out their samples of the annotated bibliography

Citation Managers

Refworks     |     Mendeley    |     Zotero    |     Endnote                

This chart compares RefWorks, Mendeley and Zotero and helps you consider what you need in a citation manager.

There are a lot of options for managing your citations.  All of the tools below provide similar functionality:

  1. They allow you to create custom folders and tags for your citations,
  2. Save a link to anything you find online,
  3. Choose automatic APA formatting,
  4. Store your data on their servers.

Each tool offers some unique features which may help you decide which one is right for you. 

How to choose: There is no right answer, it is just a matter of preference:  which features and interface you like which one addresses your needs.You might consider asking other students and faculty studying and teaching in Education which one they use.