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Citation Styles and Tools: Home

How to construct citations in MLA, Chicago, APA, ACS, and ASA, and tools that can help you

Welcome!

In this guide you will find guidance and resources for constructing your citations for the most common style guides used on campus as well as tools that can help you manage your citations and create your bibliographies, footnotes, in-text citations, and anything else you might need.

Why do we cite?

Citations are important for a number of reasons:

  • Allows readers to find a source you utilized
  • Gives credit to the creators whose work provides a foundation to yours
  • Gives credibility and support to your argument
  • Avoids plagiarism

General Citation Resources

Zbib: Zotero's online tool to create citations

NCSU Citation Builder: Helps you fill in all the necessary information for a citation depending on the source type and citation style. More reliable than generators that depend on a link because they might not find all the information you have on the source.

Research and documentation in the digital age:  Features sample student papers and 325 documentation models that guide students as they cite common sources and newer sources – such as blogs, podcasts, online videos, and reposted Web content – in MLA, Chicago, and CSE styles.  Whitman College Library Reference Collection (ZA4375 .H327 2015 )

Citation creation websites

EasyBib and other sites can be helpful in quickly creating citations for you, but they depend on the information you give them, and might not always pull the correct data or formatting. If you do use sites like this, always look over the citations it gives you to make sure they look right. The same is true for the citations created by Sherlock! When in doubt, tools like the NCSU Citation Builder will be much more likely to give you a proper citation, because they depend on your input of all elements, which does mean it takes a little more time.

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