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Citing Sources: Citation Management

Why it matters? Help in doing it right.

Why?

The more research you do, the more you need to keep your resources organized.  That's where bibliographic or citation managers come in.  They allow you to import or manually add resources, organize them into folders or by tags, add notes or annotations, and create bibliographies.

There are two flavors of citation managers:

  • Subscription
  • Open source

A subscription citation manager that the library provides is Refworks.  You can use it for your entire career at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  If you want to take the research with you, you will have to export it when you graduate and port it to another bibliographic manager.

An open source alternative is Zotero.  This is freely available though it has limits on the amount of storage you can use.  If you need more storage, then fees kick in.

We have guides to help you use both.  There are other citation managers out there, but these are the ones we know best.

Citation Generators

If you only need to write one quick citation, then you can use one of these generators to do so.  BUT, using a full citation manager will save you a lot of time in the long run.