How to Select and Use Citation Management Tools: Intro to Citation Tools

• Future EndNote and Zotero workshops: Link to EndNote Basics Workshop

• Step-by-step how-to guides for EndNote

• Step-by-step how-to guides for Zotero

This guide will provide information on citation management tools and citation generators.

Citation management tools allow you to build a collection of your references where you can include citation information, URL links, PDF files and notes. Within these libraries, you can group, organize and search for items, share items with others and back up your library online. Most importantly, however, citation management tools work within Word. Here, you point and click on items in your library as you need to cite them in the text of your paper and the citation management tool will automatically build and update your bibliography for you, saving you tons of time and formatting headaches. See below for a comparison of EndNote and Zotero.

Citation generators, often available as websites online, allow you to input your citation information and then create a one-time bibliography that you can copy and paste into your document. These are useful if you need to quickly (and more importantly, correctly) format a bibliography but aren't yet ready to make the learning commitment necessary to get started with a citation manager.

Be sure to visit also our

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation LibGuide

Help topics for long-document formatting including:

Title and Acceptance Pages

Page Numbering

Automatic Table of Contents

Captions for Tables, Figures, Equations

Converting to PDF