There are dozens of bibliographic managers out there ( see a comparative table). There are more than six thousand bibliographic styles! All we need is to download a specific journal's citation style. For different bibliographic styles we just need to re-shuffle those blocks inserting various commas, semicolons, and quotation marks.īibliographic manager keeps track of all the LEGO blocks and knows (learns easily) how to compose proper citation styles out of them. I tend to think of bibliographic metadata as LEGO.įor each paper (book chapter / pre-print / R package) we have a number of metadata pieces - title, authors, date published, etc. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one - all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.Ī brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managersīibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life.

This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post.

Zotero download styles