8-How to Cite Sources
You may be familiar with the many citation generators that allow you to auto-generate reference lists from citation data. Some allow you to save and store citations to reuse them in different lists and in different work, as needed.
Such tools are worth investigating and learning about for any long-term research project. Zotero is online and available for free to anyone from anywhere, and will store citations for you to use again later. Other popular citation generators that are free online, but do NOT save the citations, include Citation Machine (which is linked to Purdue OWL) and NoodleTools Express.
RefWorks and EndNote are subscription-based citation generators (FSCJ does not subscribe to either). Endnote has a free version called Endnote Basic, but it’s less robust. All of these options are listed in the Export link of a bibliographic record through the FSCJ library catalog.
Alternately, you could see if the library database you are using has a Cite tool. EBSCO, Gale, and Proquest databases all have a citation tool. However, these free options do not store your citations for later use either.
Good reasons to use citation generation software include:
- To save time: it takes citation generation software only a few seconds to create a citation.
- To easily convert citations from one style to another.
- To have a centralized source list that is not attached to a specific project, which allows you to reuse references and their citations in various projects.
Caution you must use with citation generation software includes:
- Citation generation software is only as good as the information entered into it. In other words, if you provide incorrect information or do not include some information, then your citation will be incorrect.
- Most citation generation software can create citations by searching for the information online. Sometimes software can pull the information from the wrong edition of a source, for example, or specific formatting (such as italics) might be lost. Or perhaps the generator didn’t use the latest version of the style guide or the generator omitted important parts of the citation.
- Always review the citations you create with this software.