Introduction
When creating a scholarly paper, it is important to reference from where you drew your facts, ideas, and inspirations. Your professor (or a journal) sets the style and if you don't want to do it by hand, try out one of the many tools for this.
If you need more context for citing, try the Excelsior Online Writing Lab or check out our Style Guides tab for resources on citing and writing.
Need help? Email our citation management team to ask a question or set up an appointment (citation-management at ucsd.edu)
When you need to format just a handful of items, try one of these.
How do the tools stack up with the basics & specialty functions?
Visit our EndNote guide.
Visit our Mendeley guide
Visit our Zotero guide
Used with permission (CC-BY) from the University of Michigan, with slight modification
Click on either the Citation Software or the Citation Generators tab at the top to learn more about the tools mentioned in this infographic.
Image meaning: For managing citation a rule of thumb could be to consider if you have less or more than 10 citations. If you have less than 10 citations, but won’t use them again, useful tools are EasyBib (https://www.easybib.com/), KnightCite (https://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/) or Citation Builder (https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/citationbuilder/).
If you have 10 or more citations, or if you will use your citations again, then there are tools for storing citations and creating bibliographies. Commonly used ones are Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and RefWorks. The first two are free and EndNote is a special case: its web version is free but limited, and there is a desktop version that has a fee and many more features. For more details see, https://ucsd.libguides.com/howtocite/compare. RefWorks is not supported on this campus.
