A good reference management and note-taking system can act like a digital filing cabinet! It can save you time by helping you to organize your sources, cite while you write, and create bibliographies quickly and easily.

There are many choices for online reference management tools; below we have listed some popular options:

Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager that allows you to build and organise a personal bibliography.

Mendeley is a free, desktop-based reference manager that allows you to search for sources and store them in a personal digital library.

EndNote features a few extra tools (you can upload PDFs and annotate them inside your EndNote library), but requires a payed subscription.

Notion is an AI-based platform that provides an online workspace to keep track of tasks, take notes and create a collaborative workspace. There is a free version, with options for payed upgrades.

Notero is a Zotero plug-in that can be used to link your Zotero reference library with Notion.

Obsidian is a free, open-source note-taking app that operates on Markdown files (see ‘Statistics and Coding page for more info on R Markdown). It allows users to make internal links for notes and visualise connections as a graph.