Citation and Organization
Organizing your work will help your writing process and help you create a successful research project.
- How much time do you have? Use this Assignment Calcuator to stay on track to complete your project on time.
- What style manual do you need to follow? Check with your instructor. Common citation styles are APA, MLA, Turabian, and Chicago. Quick explanations are on the Citations Tools page.
- How will you save your citations? Use a citation manager to make that job easier. Common ones are Zotero, and RefWorks.
- Need something quick and easy? Try ZoteroBib, a tool that helps you build a bibliography instantly from any computer or device, without creating an account or installing any software. Great for those projects where you just need a few citations in a particular style.
Writing Help
- Georgetown University Writing CenterLocated on the second floor of Lauinger.
- Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)Tips for annotated bibliographies, academic writing, and research and citation sources. Using Research explains quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing.
- Group WritingThe Writing Center at UNC provides tips about researching and writing collaboratively.
Online Style Manuals
- MLA Style CenterGuidelines and FAQs on using MLA style.
- Chicago Manual of Style Online This link opens in a new windowElectronic version of one of the most used style guides for writing in American English. Provides rules and suggestions for bibliographies and other forms of documentation such as parenthetical references, footnotes, and endnotes. Includes instructions on how to cite electronic and online sources. Also contains a chapter on grammar and usage (punctuation, spelling, etc.).
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.
