Citation Software

You may be familiar with the many citation generators that allow you to auto-generate reference lists from citation data. Many applications such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs have citation generation features that will create references based on the publication information you find or input. However, there are also some which allow you to save and store citations to reuse them in different lists and in different work, as needed, known as citation managers. Citation managers allow you to save and take notes on resources, automatically create citations and bibliographies, and share resources with others.

Such tools are worth investigating and learning about for any long-term research project. While there are multiple citation management software platforms like Mendeley and EndNote that require subscriptions or institutional access to use all their features, Zotero is an online, open-source platform that is free for anyone to use. The reference manager offers plug-ins for internet browsers, Word, and Google Docs.

Good reasons to use citation generation software include:

• To save time: it takes citation generation software only a few seconds to create a citation.
• To easily convert citations from one style to another.
• To have a centralized source list that is not attached to a specific project, which allows you to reuse references and their citations in various projects.

Things you should keep in mind when using citation generation software:

• Citation generation software is only as good as the information entered into it. In other words, if you provide incorrect information or a plug-in does not include some information, then your citation will be incorrect.
• Most citation generation software can create citations by searching for the information online. Sometimes software can pull the information from the wrong edition of a source, for example, or specific formatting (such as italics) might be lost. Or perhaps the generator didn’t use the latest version of the style guide.
• Last but not least…always review the citations you create with this software.