LibGuides: Citing Sources: Citation Management Tools

Citation Management Tools

A citation manager helps you keep track of articles and books as you find them, tag and annotate them, and easily create citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word.

EndNote Online is freely available to all ISU employees and students; it makes the storage of citations and the formatting of them in a paper much easier.

Mendeley 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.

Zotero (pronounced 'zoh-TAIR-oh') is a free add-on for the Firefox browser that can help you keep track of, organize and cite your research.

Citation Generators

Citation generators are minimalist websites that will help you to create citations to include in the bibliography or works cited pages of your papers. They will not organize your research like other, full-featured citation management systems, but they are easy to use and will create correctly-formatted citations. The principle of good in, good out applies here, so the citations are only as good as the data that you enter into the machine, so make sure to double check the completed citations before including them in your assignments.

Be Aware!

From Academic Tim Gunn

Citation software such as Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote Basic are provided for your convenience only. Please use them with caution. They are not perfect, and they do make mistakes when creating bibliographies. Be sure to review the results to check for formatting, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, required elements, etc. for the citation style you are using. Consult the appropriate official style manual for the definitive answer to your citation questions.