There are many reference managers out there to use for organizing the myriad of references and papers one acquires during their career.  One that I found recently is Zotero which is a javascript add-on for Firefox.   I won’t go through all the interesting features here, but basically, it is extremely easy to save information you find on the Web.  Not only web pages, but also journal article references (and PDFs) are easily saved. Another feature is one can sync the references to a database on their server and can be shared with groups of people.

Obviously a reference manager isn’t that useful if the information can’t be written into articles.  So, the Zotero people have included mechanisms to pull references from their database and put it into documents being written in both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.  I have used it for one paper already and it worked out reasonably well.

So, how much does all this cost? Nothing, it is free.  Try it out.