Citation and Style Manuals

ZoteroBib

• APA
• Chicago/Turabian
• MLA
• Any of the other 9,000+ CSL styles

KnightCite (Calvin College):

• APA
• Chicago [Notes-Bibliography, not Author-Date]
• MLA

Citation Builder (NCSU):

• APA
• MLA

citationmachine (commercial):

• APA
• Chicago [Notes-Bibliography, not Author-Date]
• MLA
• Turabian

Online citation generators can be great, time-saving tools.

Just remember:

Garbage in, garbage out:

• Feed the generator correct information.
• To get a good citation, you need to understand what type of source you have (chapter in an edited volume, newspaper article, etc.)
• Have all its publication information at hand.

You are smarter than a website:

• Read the citations, editing them for accuracy and format.
• Citation generators make mistakes, and they are not the author of your paper: you are.

Make sure your citations are correct!

Sometimes databases put their name in their generated citations.  Some styles require this (e.g. MLA, Chicago, Turabian) but for others (APA), this is often incorrect and for advertising purposes! Make sure only the required information makes it into your citation and in the correct format. Compare it to an example on a style manual web page or the hardcopy edition.  For information on citation styles, click here.

For instance:

MLA wants the name of the database in italics and the date you accessed it, IF this is where you took the full text from, not just if that's where you first learned about the article.

Chicago wants a different style depending on whether the article is from a "full-text library database," and an e-journal collection, or a "free web" e-journal.  See this guide from Williams College.

Turabian just wants to know the url for the article and the date you accessed it.

APA wants the DOI number but does not any database information.

Also, citation generators can only use the information they get.  Is the title of your article supposed to be in all capital letters?  Probably not, but it may have been input into the database that way many years ago.  Don't trust the citation generator.  Double check -- the generator is only a short cut, not definitive.