Citing Your Sources

Citing your sources is an essential part of academic writing. Citation management tools can help you save time by allowing you to:

• Collect references from online databases, library catalogues and websites
• Store, edit and organize your references in a personal account online
• Format citations in your papers
• Create bibliographies in citation styles such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and more
• Save and organize PDFs
• Add notes on the references you've saved

There are a number of different citation management tools available to choose from. 

Some, such as EndNote and RefWorks, require a paid subscription. Others, such as Zotero and Mendeley, are free, with the option to add in more storage or extra features for a fee.

While citation management tools such as RefWorks and Zotero have been around for a number of years, another option has been emerging: citation generators. These may be embedded in a database or journal website, or they may be found on their own sites. In most cases, a user provides the citation information for a source and the generator provides a formatted reference which can be copied and pasted into a paper. 

Some examples of these include:

• Scribbr
• EasyBib
• Citation Machine
• ZoteroBib

These services do not save your references or work with Word or Google Docs to format citations in your paper, as more powerful citation management tools such as Zotero do.