Citations

There are many reasons why it is important to cite the resources that you consult when researching a paper. The most important of these are:
1. Gives credit to authors whose works you have used (whether you quote them or not).
2. Provides a trail by which others can locate the materials you consulted.
3. Provides evidence of your research.
4. Properly citing materials is one strategy to help you avoid plagiarizing.


Learn More Writing, Style Guides, and Information Management Tools

Citing

Writing

Online Bibliography and Citation Tools

  • BibMe : The fully automatic bibliography maker that auto-fills. It's the easiest way to build a works cited page; and it's free. Search for a book, article, website, or film, or enter the information yourself. Add it to your bibliography and continue citing to build your works cited list. Download your bibliography in MLA, APA, Chicago, or Turabian format. Bibme is very easy to use, but you need to pay for a pro account to save your bibliographies.
  • (Son Of) Citation Machine : Citation machine helps students and professional researchers to properly credit the information that they use. Its primary goal is to make it so easy for student researchers to cite their information sources. However, again, if you want to save your bibliographies you need to pay for a pro account.
  • Citavi : A reference manager, knowledge organization, and task planning program for Windows, published in Switzerland. The free version is limited to 100 references per project, so it is ideal for students. Is also integrates with Chrome and Word.
  • Cite This For Me : Cite This For Me allows you to automatically create website citations in the APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard referencing styles at the click of a button. Simply browse to the page you wish to cite and click the button to generate a correctly formatted citation. Then copy-paste the citation into your assignment, or add it to your online bibliography for safe keeping until later. Cite This For Me also comes with a Google Chrome extension.
  • Citefast : Cite your work at APA, MLA, and Chicago without leaving the homepage in 3 easy steps. The fourth step allows you to download your bibliography; you can even save it if you create an account. Your citations will be kept as long as you keep visiting the site, but after four days of inactivity your citations will be deleted.
  • Citelighter: Store, organize, and share your education and research for free. Creating internet-research bibliographies can be infuriating to say the least, so Citelighter grabs all relevant info to create accurate citations for you. The best part? Anything Citelighter misses you can add yourself, and it will save your additions for future users!
  • Docear : An open source reference manager that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and offers PDF metadata retrieval, free online backup of your mind maps, a monitoring function for new files (PDFs, images, etc.), and an MS-Word add on. Oh, and it also allows you to have full control over your data (no registration required).
  • Recipes4Success :Creating a complete and correctly formatted citation is a challenge for many students, especially documenting sources such as art and music that aren't included in traditional citation formats. Create a citation formatted in either APA or MLA style. Students will still need to completely document the information, but the Citation Maker will format it for them.
  • OttoBib : Creating creates citations from ISBNs (which means that your book needs to have a clearly visible ISBN), OttoBib allows you to enter more than one ISBN at a time. Perfect for students who use books for their sources, it also comes with a Google Chrome extension.
  • RefDot : An extension for your Google Chrome browser, RefDot makes citation easy; it allows you to cite and store books or journal references, as well as add books automatically from Amazon book pages, which comes in handy.
  • Zotero: Zotero is a veteran and completely free browser based plugin that helps you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. This tool lives right where you do your work; in the web browser itself. Whether you need to create footnotes, endnotes, in-text citations, or bibliographies, Zotero will do all the dirty work for you, leaving you free to focus on your writing. Create citations in Word and OpenOffice without ever leaving your word processor and add references to an email, a Google Doc, or some other editor simply by dragging one or more references out of Zotero. The only disadvantage? Zotero doesn’t allow you to annotate a PDF document.
  • Easy Bib -( MLA Free) : A great citation generator, EasyBib compiles your bibliographies and citations for you, saving you valuable time. You don’t need to create an account if you are using MLA, but Chicago or APA style citations require a paid account. EasyBib also offers an app for iOS and Android, so you can cite your sources on the go.

What is citation management software?

Citation management tools allow a user to organize and retrieve information, such as citations for books, articles, and Web sites, by interfacing with library databases. The citation manager then works with word-processing software to insert properly formatted footnotes or citations into a paper and create a properly formatted bibliography.

    • Mendeley is a free, web-based tool for managing references, creating bibliographies, and pdf organizer.
    • Zotero is a free, open source, web-based tool for managing citations, organizing pdfs, and creating bibliographies.

 

 

What is Plagiarism?

  • Plagiarism is using another person's work without giving them credit.

Easy ways to avoid plagiarizing:

  • Never cut and paste material into a paper.
  • Cite your sources.

Learn More About Plagiarism

Free Plagiarism Detection Tools

  1. DupliChecker 
    1. Pros:
      1. 100% free.
      2. Extremely easy to use.
      3. Has the options of copy-pasting the text, entering the URL of the content destination required to be checked, or uploading a text file.
      4. Registered users can perform 50 searches per day.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Unregistered users can perform only 1 search per day.
    3. Paid Version:  
      1. Not available.
  2. CopyLeaks 
    1. Pros: 
      1. Offers entire website plagiarism scan.
      2. Finds content duplication in more that 60 trillion pages over the internet.
      3. Support of multiple file formats in any language.
      4. CopyLeaks API allows you to integrate CopyLeaks service and include it as part of your product.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Only for online content.
      2. You need to create an account to use it.
    3. Paid Version: 
      1. Free of charge at the moment, will soon add premium subscription to the service.
  3. PaperRater
    1. Pros: 
      1. Offers 3 tools: Grammar checking, plagiarism detection, and writing suggestions.
      2. It is developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students.
      3. Readability statistics.
      4. Title validation.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Cannot save reports.
    3. Paid version: 
      1. Accepts longer documents (up to 6000 words).
      2. Faster processing.
      3. No banner ads.
      4. Ability to upload documents.
      5. $7.95/mo (with annual payment).
  4. Plagiarisma 
    1. Pros: 
      1. Offers a free download of plagiarism software for Windows.
      2. 190+ languages supported.
      3. Searches website content from a URL.
    2. Cons: 
      1. The report is for exact matches only.
      2. The Synonymizer tool (rewrites sentences with synonyms to generate unique text) facilitates plagiarism.
      3. Even when registered you cannot scan documents for more than 3 times per day.
    3. Paid version: 
      1. Unlimited plagiarism checker with task scheduler.
      2. Starts at $5.00 per month.
  5. PlagiarismChecker
    1. Pros: 
      1. 100% free.
      2. Easy and detailed instructions.
      3. Ideal for educators to check whether a student's paper has been copied from the internet.
      4. The "Author" option allows for checking if others have plagiarized your work online.
      5. Does not require any download or installation.
    2. Cons: 
      1. It searches phrases separately, which means that you need to hit “Enter” after each phrase.
    3. Paid Version:
      1. Not available.
  6. Plagium
    1. Pros: 
      1. Very easy to use (via copy paste).
      2. Scans up to 5,000 words at a time.
      3. Perfect for a quick search on the web or social media.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Free features are limited (e.g. you need to pay to upload files).
    3. Paid Version: 
      1. From $0.004 to $0.08 USD by 1,000 characters for Quick search, Deep search, File search, or Alert.
  7. PlagScan 
    1. Pros: 
      1. Updates you about the progress continuously.
      2. Does not require any download or installation.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Scan is limited to 1000 at a time.
      2. Rather complicated interface.
    3. Paid Version: 
      1. Variable plans for private users, schools, universities, and companies.
  8. PlagTracker
    1. Pros: 
      1. Very quick to scan more than 20 million academic works for any plagiarized copy.
      2. Clear instructions on how to use it.
      3. Offers report with details about your work.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Not 100% accurate; you may need to use an extra plagiarism detection tool to make sure your content is authentic (note: Never check through only one service anyhow).
    3. Paid Version: 
      1. Checks a larger database of documents.
      2. Grammar check.
      3. $14.99 USD per month.
  9. Quetext
    1. Pros: 
      1. 100% Free
      2. Easy to use interface.
      3. Unlimited usage without having to create an account or download software.
    2. Cons: 
      1. You cannot upload files, only copy and paste text.
    3. Paid Version: 
      1. Not available
  10. Viper
    1. Pros: 
      1. 100% free.
      2. Scans your document through more than 10 billion resources such as academic essays and other online sources.
      3. Offers side-by-side comparisons for plagiarism.
      4. Scans against essays on your computer.
    2. Cons: 
      1. Requires a download.
      2. Is available to Microsoft Windows users only.
    3. Paid Version: 
      1. Not available