Capstone and Thesis Research: Organize Your Research

Click Here to view our Mendeley toolkit (or go to Bastyr Libraries Homepage > Mendeley & Zotero)!

Mendeley is a free reference manager and PDF organizer. Use Mendeley to:

• save and organize research articles and docs (about 3,000 PDFs in the free version);
• annotate (add your own notes and highlights to) sections of interest in saved articles;
• generate reference lists and citations for reports and papers.

Zotero (pronounced zoh-TAIR-oh) is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.

Zotero is, at the most basic level, a reference manager. It is designed to store, manage, and cite bibliographic references, such as books and articles. In Zotero, each of these references constitutes an item. More broadly, Zotero is a powerful tool for collecting and organizing research information and sources. Here are the basic steps to setting up Zotero:

1. Go to the Zotero website and click the red Download button
2. Click the blue download button and follow the prompts to install Zotero for your computer type (Mac, Windows, etc.)
3. Install the Zotero browser connector (Chrome, Firefox, etc.); this makes saving PDFs, webpages, or any other reference type super easy!
4. Open Zotero and view the Zotero Quick Start guide
5. Start adding references!

Not sure whether Zotero or Mendeley is the best fit for you? Check out this guide from York University Libraries comparing the two! (Partial screenshot below)