Research 101: Citation Tools

Citation generators allow you to enter your source's bibliographic information (such as title and author for a journal article, web page, or book) in order to produce a citation in your selected format.

Refworks

Refworks is a citation manager that imports citations from many library databases and Google Scholar, enables you to attach PDFs to citations, add notes, and generates bibliographies in many formats, including APA or MLA.

To use it, you will need to set up a free account using your Hostos email address.

Free citation builders

These are owned by universities, are entirely free and have no ads. You put in your information and they will put everything in the correct format. They will not, however, try to look up any information that you are missing.

• North Carolina State University citation builder.

• University of North Carolina citation builder

• KniteCite belongs to Calvin College and is also a citation builder.

Commercial citation generators

BibME  Citation Machine EasyBib - these are now all owned by the Chegg Company, and are very similar. They can sometimes fill in information that you are missing, but you may still need to fill in several blanks about author, volume, publisher, date of publication, etc., to create a correct citation. These are commercial websites and will display many ads.

• As of November 2017, Citation Machine and BibME will provide citations in multiple styles for free.
• EasyBib will create citations for free in MLA, but they ask you to pay a $10 subscription fee in order to cite in APA, Chicago, and other styles. 

Some library databases have built-in citation generators that allow you to click on a "Cite" button to get a citation for that article or book. (Also see the citation generator embedded in OneSearch, below.)

Note: Always double-check the citations generated through these tools, which can make errors.

Citation management software

People who are collecting and organizing dozens or literally hundreds of citations--such as students working on a senior thesis, graduate students working on dissertations, and professors writing books or journal articles for peer-review--often use citation management programs. 

Examples of well-known programs that let you sign up for a free account and download software include Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote Basic (the free version of EndNote).

If you only need to format 5-10 citations for your project, these programs may not be worth the time it takes to learn to use them - but if you are curious, by all means check them out and see what they're about!

When you find items in OneSearch, you can click on the citation tool above the short description:

Clicking on the tool will open a box in which you can choose your citation style and then copy the citation: