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Library Research Guides

Grant Writing Help in Engineering

This guide provides tips on writing grants for College of Engineering researchers.

Comparing Citation Management Software

Use this comparison chart to determine which citation manager (Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote) best meets your needs. 

What is Citation Management Software?

Citation management software helps you:

  • organize references, PDFs, and images
  • take notes on references and PDFs
  • format bibliographies and in-text citations in hundreds of citations styles
  • share references and collaborate on projects with colleagues

This guide only covers citation software supported by U-M Library: Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote. When deciding which one to use, consider your research habits, word processing needs, and collaboration/sharing needs. These programs can work with each other and some people may need to use more than one throughout their academic career.

NSF Citation Style in Mendeley

Mendeley doesn't have a citation style that contains all of the citation requirements for NSF proposals. Karen Coulter (Glotzer Group Lab Manager) created a new citation style that lists all authors explicitly and includes page numbers and DOI. 
 
To use this style, when in Mendeley (desktop version), in the View dropdown menu, select "Citation Style >> More Styles..."  A new window will open; choose the tab "Get more styles." In the "Download Style" text entry bar, paste in: http://csl.mendeley.com/styles/21441471/Glotzer-NSF-compliant-withDOI
The style will be listed in the menu as "Glotzer-NSF-compliant with DOI." 

NSF Citation Style in Zotero

Zotero has a citation style that meets NSF's proposal requirements. It isn't available by default in Zotero but you can add it. Directions on how to add or import new citation styles into Zotero can be found here. You can search the Zotero Style Repository to see the over 8,000 citation styles available.