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Citation Managers

The Old School Way

You can make your citations the old school way with a style guide. Just type out your citations. Take a look at our Citing Sources guide for quick reference in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles.

We also keep copies of many style guides at the One Stop Desk in Charles Library, including MLA, APA, Chicago, and AMA.

  • The Old School Way works adequately for a short paper.  For longer papers and projects, or if you will have to cite the same sources again in other papers, you may want to try a citation manager.

What is a Citation Manager?

A citation manager is a program used to store, organize, share, and output citations. Some citation managers have the added functionality of an academic social network. Once the citation information is stored in the citation manager, it can be output in many different styles, like MLA, APA, Chicago, or others. It saves the writer/researcher from having to type out the same citation and bibliography over and over again by hand.

Citation managers make it easy to:

  • Gather citations from databases and websites
  • Edit, organize, and search citations
  • Output citations in many formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.)

Citation managers integrate with word-processing programs for inputting in-text citations and generating the corresponding bibliographies.

A citation manager is a valuable time-saving tool for researchers and anyone writing a paper with cited references/bibliographies.

Temple supports EndNote/EndNote Web, Mendeley, and Zotero. In addition to these, there are many other citation managers available for free or for purchase.

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