The Bluebook is the standard citation format for nearly all law reviews and journals. It is compiled and maintained as a joint collaboration among the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. The most recent edition, the 21st, was released in 2020.
The BluebookMastering the Bluebook takes time and practice, but there are additional resources to help you navigate the Bluebook.
Understanding and Mastering the Bluebook by One organizational tool relatively new to the game is Powernotes, a Chrome extension which allows you to save, annotate, and organize links and PDFs, including in Lexis/Westlaw/Bloomberg.
Penn does not currently provide subscriptions to this, but you can create one project for free or subscribe individually. If you find it especially useful, you may also contact the law library to indicate your support for us purchasing this service.
A citation manager helps you keep track of articles and books as you find them, tag and annotate them, and easily create citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word. Using any citation manager will be more efficient for most scholars than not using one at all. Each manager has its own plug-in for Microsoft Word and some also have browser plug-ins for easy capture of web links. Each manager also has built-in connections to Google Scholar and common library reference databases. Each manager has options for group-based collaborative research.
We offer five main choices to you in this guide: Refworks, Zotero, Mendeley, Endnote, and Papers.
Refworks, the most popular choice on campus, is provided by Penn Libraries for the Penn community (including alumni). It is a stable, well-established platform, but has limitations in terms of working with PDF files.
Endnote, the oldest of the four, works well for the health sciences and for large collections of articles, despite some technical and installation issues.
Zotero is an open-source software program that is notable for its ease of use, its ability to grab screenshots, and its capabilities for archiving website content for local storage.
Mendeley, the newest option of the four, is a cloud-based proprietary system that includes Facebook-style social networking, PDF annotation, a platform for self-promotion and crowd-sourcing of citations and annotations. Mendeley has a wide range of functionality but suffers from performance and accuracy issues.
Papers, was once only available for Mac users. Now, available for Windows and IOS devices. Papers is known for its ability to manage you only your references but also your PDF collection.
We recommend that you explore a variety of citation managers, consulting with library staff as needed, before choosing one. We can provide guidance on best practices and share our experiences.