How do you organize references for your paper?

Managing references for your article has come a long way over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago, you had to manually add references to a document, both as a citation in the text and in the bibliography. Fortunately, those days are over, so now you can use a tool like EndNote or RefWorks, as two examples of commercial products that can be purchased individually or used as part of a site license from your employer. If you have not already used one these programs, I highly encourage you to do that. You will save yourself an enormous amount of time. These programs allow you to automatically add references to your paper after you have added them through PubMed or another searchable database, and then you have the easy ability to manipulate the format of the citation in the text and the reference style in the bibliography. If you need to change the reference style depending on the journal you are targeting for submission, then you literally can make that change in one click of your mouse. Rather than spending so much time manually changing from “(1)” to “Smith et al., 2015” in the text and the accompanying structure of each reference in the bibliography, you can literally change from APA to Vancouver or any other one of hundreds of styles with the click of a button. So, when you are invariably faced with a second submission of your paper to another journal, the last thing you want to do is spend many hours reformatting your paper’s references to accommodate the new journal’s requirements, when a tool like EndNote or RefWorks allows you to make the change almost instantaneously. As a personal recommendation, I have also found that the customer service of EndNote’s staff to be exceptional. Any time I have had a problem that I could not resolve, I have been able to get someone at EndNote to walk me through the resolution every time and they do it absolutely at no charge. Once again, I highly recommend utilizing this tool for your references and save yourself lots of time and aggravation in the process.