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Need help organizing your sources?

Use a citation management tool to create personalized databases of your source references.

Citation management applications will allow you to:

  • import and organize citations,
  • create folders for different projects,
  • share folders with collaborators on group projects,
  • format citations and create reference lists in various styles, and
  • write and store your personalized notes and annotations. 

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Finding Citations on Library's Website/Databases

 

Library's Summons Search

Just about every library database/research database will have a button to generate citations. For our library's results landing page, it looks like a quotation mark button.

image of a search result from the uta libraries summons research results page. A blue arrow is pointing to blue quotation marks at the top right of the box, indicating where the researcher should click in order to get to the citation style drop down menu

After clicking on the quotation marks, you can select your citation style

image of the pop up that occurs when you click on the previously mentioned quotation marks. A blue arrow points to the drop down arrow on the top right of the box, which will give the researcher options for citation styles

Then, after selecting your citation style, it will auto generate the citation. You can copy, paste, and reformat these into your works cited/reference page.

image of the pop up box providing the sample citation in black text over a light blue background, after selecting the chosen citation style (in this case, MLA), there is a button for

A note on citation generators: citation generators are dependent upon metadata that is uploaded along with the article when it is placed into a database. This metadata is not always accurate or fully included. With this in mind, always double check your citations!

Exporting to citation management tool:

image of a sample search results from UTA libraries database summons search. The blue elipses in the top right corner of the result has been selected and clicked. A drop down menu with "export to" at the top has options for various citation management programs that the sample citation can be exported to for organization. There is a blue arrow pointing to "Zotero"

 

 If you prefer to export your citations to a citation management tool, click on the ellipses next to any research result, and select your citation management tool. I personally recommend Zotero. You can find a full guide on how to use Zotero here. If you are struggling to retrieve a citation, you can download the article, upload it to your Zotero page/account, and generate a citation from Zotero. See the guide for more info, or contact your subject librarian!

 

Finding Citations on External Databases

External Databases

In other databases, the citation generator button can look a little different. Here are some examples of what a citation generator button can look like on a variety of databases.

(see above) In Proquest, we see a green quotation mark button. This can be clicked to generation citations.

(see above) In the JSTOR database, the button says "cite" and has a text bubble emoticon next to it. Click on it to select your citation style, copy, and paste.

(see above) In the Project Muse database, it simple says "View Citation." You can click here to pick your citation style. Then, select the whole line, and right lick on the highlighted portion to copy/paste.

MLA bibliography, which is part of the EbscoHost family of databases, the citation button is located on the right side of the article's landing page. It looks like a yellow sticky-note. Click on that, and then scroll down to select, and copy/paste your citation. Don't forget to double check your citations!

There are many different styles for citation buttons, so sometimes you may have to look carefully! But if you are still struggling to locate it, check out the various citation style guides from Owl Purdue to write the citation on your own. You can also use citation management programs, like Zotero, to generate them!