Civil & Environmental Engineering: Writing + Citing

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.
  • ​Zotero guide
• 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.
  • Mendeley guide
• 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.
  • EndNote guide
• 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.

Publishers' style guides provide instructions for writing an article for one of its publications.  They typically specify the layout and length of the paper, rules for units, graphs and tables, copyright terms, and how to submit the paper. 

• ACS - Authors & Reviewers
• AGU Author Resource Center
• AIP Style Manual Published by the American Institute of Physics
• AMS Author Resource Center
• ANS Information for Authors
• ASCE Resources for Authors
• ASME - Author Guidelines
• Communications of the ACM - Information for Authors
• ICE Author Guidelines
• IEEE Author Tools
• IET Author Guides
• ORS Instructions for Authors
• Physical Review style (APS journals)
• Springer Manuscript Preparation

The campus offers writing support for students through the College Writing Programs office.

The Student Learning Center also offers both appointments and drop-in help.

Are you looking to improve your technical and scientific communication skills in English? These resources may help:

• IEEE English for Technical Professionals - interactive online course to advance technical communications skills
• Oxford Dictionaries - bilingual dictionaries including English to Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish
• Science research writing for non-native speakers of English (ebook) / Hilary Glasman-Deal - World Scientific Press
• Making sense : a student's guide to research and writing: engineering and the technical sciences (print) / Margot Northey and Judi Jewinski - Oxford University Press
• Scientific writing in a second language (print) / David Ian Hanauer and Karen Englander - Parlor Press
• Toward speaking excellence: the Michigan guide to maximizing your performance on the TSE test and other speaking tests (print) / Dean Papajohn - University of Michigan Press
• Writing science in plain English (print) / Anne E. Greene - University of Chicago Press