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Citation Guides
The primary reasons for citing sources in a research paper are to give credit to the authors whose work you have drawn upon and to allow readers to track down your sources, should they wish to do so.
There are many style guides for formatting citations and creating bibliographies. APA and Chicago are frequently used in public policy, but you may be called upon to use others.
- Academic Citation Resource Guide
A comprehensive guide from SuperSummary. - DocsCite
DocsCite is a step-by-step guide to putting government publication citations into proper style format (APA or MLA) using a template; from Arizona State University.
- Michigan State Citation Guide
For guidelines on how to cite data specifically.
Citation Management Systems
These tools allow you to gather citations and PDFs in one place and then quickly create a bibliography. You have to start using them well before your paper is due, however.
- ZoteroZotero is a free tool designed to help you gather, manage and share information about books, articles, web pages and other digital objects that you are using in your research, and to generate citations and bibliographies. Zotero is a Mozilla browser plugin. You can choose to gather your data on your hard drive (if you are working mainly from one computer), or on a flash drive or a network (if you frequently access your data at multiple workstations).
- RefWorks This link opens in a new windowRefWorks is an online research management, writing, and collaboration tool designed to help researchers gather, manage, store, and share information and generate citations and bibliographies.
