Managing references

There are lots of ways of handling your academic references, and several tools available. Here are some of the better ones:

Bibdesk: OSX only, free software. Built on top of BibTeX, so it works great together with LaTeX.
Papers: OSX only, commercial.
Endnote: OSX/Win, commercial. One of the most widely used. Plugins for MS Word.

[edit] Exporting references from Google Scholar

Go to Google Scholar
Select the Scholar preferences
At the bottom of the preferences page you find a menu where you can choose which reference format you prefer (BibTex, Endnote, Reference Manager, etc.)
From now on, when you do your search you will see a link saying "Import into [BibTex, Endnote, etc.]".
Click on the link, and you will get up a new window with your reference formatted according to your personal setting.
Copy the reference, and paste it into your reference manager (e.g. BibDesk). Since Google's automatic reference extraction isn't always perfect, you will probably have to fix the reference a bit to get it correct. But this method still saves a lot of time and effort!

Main window	Preferences	Select reference format	Import
The reference	Imported reference