Do you need help keeping track of relevant journal articles, conference papers, and other academic sources for your research or courses? Use citation management tools to keep things organized.
Learning objectives
After completing this short tutorial, you will be able to:
- Understand what a citation is and why citation managers are important.
- Identify different citation managers and their benefits.
What is a citation?
A citation:
- Describes a book, journal article, website, or other published item.
- Gives credit to the originator of an idea, thus preventing plagiarism.
- Enables the reader to retrieve the item to which you are referring.
- Includes the author, title, source (publisher and place of publication or URL), and date.
Source: https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/citationsoftware
Citation: A (Very) Brief Introduction. This video provides a short introduction to how and when to use citations. Created by NCSU Libraries under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA US license via YouTube.
Why are citations important?
In addition to the reasons listed above, you should cite your sources to:
- Elevate other people’s work and ideas.
- Direct readers toward related research.
- Empower marginalized voices.
- Contextualize your work.
- Support and validate your ideas.
- Increase your credibility.
For more insight into the power of citations, watch the following presentation by Christina Fena at ACRL 2021 titled “Citation as empowerment: Motivating undergraduates to value their source list”.
Scholarly articles are not created in a vacuum
What is plagiarism, and how do you avoid it?
Plagiarism is the act of intentionally or unintentionally taking credit for someone else’s work. The easiest way to avoid plagiarism is to give credit to the original author by citing the information correctly.
Watch the following video to learn more about plagiarism:
Citation Management Software
Citation management software allows you to collect, organize, share, and format citations. Most of these tools allow users to add citations to Microsoft Word or Google Drive documents. The following chart outlines the different citation (reference) management options supported by the UF Libraries. This module will focus on the free options.
Notes:
- Zotero and SciWheel both work well with Google Docs and offer shared folder options for group collaboration.
- Unlike Mendeley, Zotero has very strong digital privacy and security.
- Zotero only offers 300 MB of free storage through the individual plan.
- SciWheel offers unlimited storage when you create an institutional account through UF
- EndNote offers up to 2GB of attachments and 50,000 references.
- Mendeley’s free subscription offers up to 2GB of cloud storage.
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software
- https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=147417&p=968320#s-lg-box-24023144
Other useful citation tools and resources
- Zotero Bib – Citation Generator
- Citation Machine – Citation Generator
- Anatomy of a citation
- APA Style – Style Guide
- Purdie Owl – Style Guide