Online Privacy: Managing Citations

Reference managers (also called citation managers or bibliographic management software) offer a way to save, organize and manage references. Many work with word processing software to format in-text citations and bibliographies for papers and theses, allow you to share references, and enable you to attach or link PDFs to a citation record.

Wikipedia comparison of reference management software

RefWorks

• Free to UC Berkeley users
• Web-based: use at any computer with internet access
• Format bibliographies in Word
• Import citations from RSS feeds
• Use UC-eLinks to find the full text of articles from within RefWorks
• Share lists of references or create a group account for co-editing
• From ProQuest

Zotero

• Free (up to 300 MB web storage) browser extension
• Sync Zotero to access your library from any computer with internet access
• Format bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice
• Capture citation data from PDFs and web pages
• Share and collaboratively edit lists of references
• Open source software from the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University

If you've never used Zotero before, use the QuickStart Guide to get started.

Change your preferences if you want  Zotero to

• set your default citation style
• search the full text of pdfs you save
• Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items

To use Zotero to find specific articles in our library's databases, set up the Open URL resolver with this link: http://ucelinks.cdlib.org:8888/sfx_local? 

An in-depth discussion of the relative virtues of Endnote and Zotero,

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.

Rao, Aditi. "How to Cite Social Media: MLA and APA formats." TeachBytes, 04.09.13.  Web. 24 February, 2015.

Also, Purdue's Online Writing Lab MLA guide to citing online resources.