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Geography 50AC - California: Citations

Citation Management Tools

Citation management software helps you to collect and organize papers, cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles.

Popular citation management tools in the sciences and engineering include:

  • Zotero is a free and easy-to-use tool for collecting, managing, and citing the sources you find during your research. It can be integrated with Google Docs, Overleaf, and Word for easily formatting citations while writing.
  • Mendeley is a freely available reference manager and academic social network that can be used to organize your research, create bibliographies, collaborate with others, and discover current developments. It can be integrated with Overleaf and Word for easily formatting citations while writing.
  • BibTeX is a tool and format for simply organizing citations in a .bib text file. It can be used in LaTeX to format citations and bibliographies in a variety of styles. Overleaf offers extensive guidance on how to use .bib files with bibtex and biblatex, a newer package that is actively being developed.
    • JabRef is a free tool for more effectively organizing and viewing your .bib libraries and formatting references and bibliographies.
  • EndNote is bibliographic management software that you install on your computer. It offers sophisticated, flexible tools for organizing references and creating bibliographies. EndNote works with Word to format citations and create bibliographies in a comprehensive variety of styles. Get the student price by purchasing online with proof of student status.
  • Papers is low-cost software that allows you to search, retrieve, organize, and annotate article PDFs. It can be integrated with Google Docs and Word for easily formatting citations.
  • Paperpile is a low-cost web tool for collecting and organizing papers and easily formatting citations and bibliographies in Google Docs.

Citation Help

"Ethics, copyright laws, and courtesy to readers require authors to identify the sources of direct quotations and of any facts or opinions not generally known or easily checked."--
Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press), p. 594

Why cite sources?
Whenever you quote or base your ideas on another person's work, you must document the source you used. Even when you do not quote directly from another work, if reading that source contributed to the ideas presented in your paper, you must give the authors proper credit.

Citations allow readers to locate and further explore the sources you consulted, show the depth and scope of your research, and give credit to authors for their ideas. 

Citation Styles

Below are links to guides for the three major styles used for most academic papers or research in the humanities, social sciences, and some scientific disciplines:

  • APA Style Guide (Purdue) - From the American Psychological Association. Often preferred in the fields of psychology and many other social sciences.
  • MLA Style Guide (Purdue) - From the Modern Language Association of America. Often preferred in the fields of literature, arts, humanities, and in some other disciplines.
  • Chicago Manual of Style Guide, 16th Ed. (Purdue) - From the University of Chicago Press. Often preferred in history and many other disciplines.

Introduction to Citation Management

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An overview of citation management software.

Feeding Pigeons by Poddington Bear is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. 

How to Avoid Plagiarism

In order to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

  • You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
  • You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
  • You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
  • You paraphrase another person's spoken or written word.

Recommendations

  • Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author's original work.
  • Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
  • Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
  • Even when you paraphrase another author's writings, you must give credit to that author.
  • If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.
  • The figure below may help to guide your decisions.

 

This content is part of the Understanding Plagiarism tutorial created by the Indiana University School of Education.