Skip to Main Content

Medical Sciences : Research Resources: Managing your References

Guide to Oxford University library resources for postgraduates, postdocs and researchers in the Medical Sciences Division.
Subjects: Medicine

What Reference Management software can do

Cite your sources & create your bibliography in a flash

Reference management software allows you to create your personal database of references. Gather, store, search, organise and share your references. When writing your paper you can automatically insert your citations in the desired format and create your bibliography at the click of a button. 

Choice of software

The University makes RefWorks and EndNote Web available free of charge to its members. You can buy the full EndNote package at a discount from the IT Services shop. Several other packages can be freely downloaded from the Internet. These include Mendeley and Zotero which provide free basic accounts, although these are limited in the storage space available. If you are using LaTeX to process documents containing large amounts of mathematical formulae and expressions, you may find BibTeX useful.

Easy export to RefWorks and EndNote is possible from SOLO & many bibliographic databases (e.g. Scopus, Web of Knowledge, Ovid databases). 

Need help?

The Bodleian Libraries and IT Services run courses every term from basic to advanced level. See the Training & Guides tab for more information. If you can't attend a course, you can contact the library for one-on-one assistance. There's also plenty of material on-line. See the box below for some quick start guides.

Reference Management software

Exporting from PubMed to RefWorks

How to send references from PubMed to RefWorks

It's a bit more complicated than in our subscription databases.
If you've done a search in PubMed:
  1. Tick the boxes of the records you want.
  2. Click on Send to Clipboard > Add to Clipboard.
  3. Click on Send to. Choose the Destination 'File' and the Format 'MEDLINE'.
  4. Click on Create File, then Save it to the Desktop as a text file. Note the file name. 
  5. Open RefWorks and Log in.
  6. In Refworks, hover on References dropdown and select Import.
  7. Make sure Import Filter/Data Source is NLM/PubMed and Database is PubMed.  You can also select a folder to import the file directly into if you wish.
  8. Browse your computer files for the PubMed results text file you saved from PubMed above.
  9. Click on Import.

Other LibGuides

Quick Start Guides

Some 'how to' guides to help get you started.