Introduction
When creating a scholarly paper, it is important to reference from where you drew your facts, ideas, and inspirations. There are many styles you might use - from APA to MLA (showing author & year) to Uniform Requirements (using a number only) to using a specific journal style. Properly using a reference requires knowledge about the citation style you need to use, so even though these tools do most of the heavy lifting - you still need to know a little about your style. For example, where, in your sentence, should the citation appear - is it at the end or somewhere in the middle of a sentence? Examples can help, and we have some for you, but if you have any questions, check out the Purdue Owl.
3 options for citing:
Which tool should I use?
There are lots of tools and several are highlighted on this guide. Below is an algorithm to help you figure out which tool is advised for your project.
Used with permission (CC-BY) from the University of Michigan, with slight modification
Image text: 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.
For more information on the tools in this infographic, please see our guide, How to Cite.
