Answered By Library Staff
Last Updated: Jul 22, 2024     Views: 157

The library recommends Zotero for managing, generating, and exporting citations for research materials. We have a guide on how to use Zotero below. It is free. 

However, if you do not want to download software to manage your citations, our Discovery Catalog Search will generate citations for some materials, including materials our library does not own, for you to collect in a copy-and-paste fashion. Simply find the item in Discovery and then use the the citation button at the result: 

An example of citation icon

A popup will open and you can select your citation style needed from the dropdown:

How to use citation select

Then, a citation will generate in the white space that you can copy and paste from: 

How to use copy citation

Be sure to double check that it generated everything correctly (the above example does have a slight error), but it can save you from having to type a lot and should get you 90% of the way there. Be sure to paste with matching format (font style and size) into your word processor (such as Word). 

This cannot generate citations for some webpages unless they are articles indexed by a database and it cannot generate a citation if you only used a chapter of a book, typically. You will have to manually create those citations or use a different citation generator, like Zotero. 

See the links below to more information.