#but at some point I won't be there anymore and Zotero has a Linux version (duh. it's based on firefox)

[haruka89]

Of the two citation managers up there? Use Zotero.

Zotero is FOSS software and the desktop application is based on firefox, which means add-ons for additional functionality and data back-ups and stuff are similar to firefox. And Firefox's PDF.js pdf-reader/editor is also part of Zotero! You can read and annotate your text directly within Zotero and integrate those into your workflow.

Also, Zotero intergrates with both MS Word and LibreOffice (and some others with the help of additional add-ons), which makes citing as you write easier.

Zotero also has online syncing/collaboration functionality.

More importantly, Mendeley belongs to Elsevier. One of those nice science publishing houses that rips everyone off with their paywalls. (Also, last year I heard about some fuckery they did, but I don't remember what it was.) Unless you trust someone like Elsevier or Wiley or all those others to not fuck you over for higher profits, use something else.

There's one citation manager that's supposed to be good for LaTex/Tex/BibTex (f those words don't mean anything to you, just go with Zotero) and iirc it's also FOSS. Can't remember its name, though.

There are also others. (Citavi and EndNote are popular proprietary citation managers that your university might have contracts with.)

in re plagiarism and citation and people not knowing how to do it

in the capstone class of my MASTER's degree, I had to do a group paper with fellow students who had all done 6+ years of collegiate study to get there

we shared drafts of our portions and they had no citations and i was like???? and they were like "it's a draft i'll put the citations in at the end" and i was like ???????

because by the time you're done writing the thing you're not going to remember what you got where and whether you synthesized information together! this is how "i thought i thought of it" plagiarism cases occur!!!!

anyway i told them at the bare minimum any time they referenced a numerical figure they needed to cite it, and since it was a paper on accounting fraud that mostly worked out. but i could tell they were citing stuff simply because i'd told them to cite where numbers came from, because they didn't bother to cite some non-numerical things that definitely needed it.

anyway this is why when you have classes that have multiple assignments for a paper to teach you how to write it, annotated bibliography comes before drafting. because you're supposed to have your sources and know what's in them when you start writing.

to current college students: PLEASE put the citations in as you're writing not as you're editing. i know it seems like a pita especially if you don't know the formatting well, but that's what tools like Purdue Owl are for. Tell it what citation format you're supposed to use, what kind of source you have, fill in the fields and it will format the citation for you.