Ask A Librarian
Citing Sources
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. Check with your professor and see if they have a preference for what you should use. You have access to multiple style guides through the library (and Purdue OWL, linked below, is available online). If you have questions about citations, ask a librarian! We're happy to help.
Citation Guides
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association by ISBN: 9781433832161Publication Date: 2019-10-01
Citation Managers
- 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.
- 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).
- MendeleyMendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. You can automatically generate bibliographies, collaborate with other researchers online, import papers from other research software, find relevant papers based on what you’re reading, and access your papers from anywhere online.
