Citation Guides: Citation Management Tools

When working on extensive research projects, you will need to collect, organize and properly format all your citations. There are a wide variety of tools available to help you manage your citations and assist in formatting. Remember that you still must verify that your citations are properly formatted before submitting your work.

Just need a few citations converted to APA, MLA or Chicago format? Try these tools

• Citation Builder (NCSU Libraries)
  Creates citations for APA, MLA, Chicago or CSE name/year styles

• KnightCite (Calvin College)
  Creates citation for MLA (default), APA or Chicago styles

• Citeus Legalus
  Generate citations in Bluebook format

• Tweet2Cite
  Converts Tweets into properly formatted MLA and APA styles

There are dozens of apps that will help you manage your citations. The most popular ones provide the same basic features and functionality with a few exceptions. Use this chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software) to narrow down your choices, particularly if you have specific operating system, browser or office software integration preferences. Talk to people in your department; some disciplines tend to use one tool more than others.

These are the most commonly used reference managers:

• Zotero (Georgia StateUniversity has a good site with lots of Zotero-related information: http://research.library.gsu.edu/zotero)
• Mendeley (Washington University has a Mendeley Guide: https://libguides.wustl.edu/c.php?g=47217&p=303183 )
• EndNote (University of Iowa maintains an EndNote guide: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/endnotebasic/)

Note that some of the instructions given in those guides are specific to the school; if you have questions about how to use citation managers at McDaniel, contact the library: https://ask.hoover.mcdaniel.edu/