InfoGuides: Electrical Engineering Resources (MS): Citation Management Tools

Last Updated: Apr 22, 2024 9:27 AM

Citation Management Tools

Citation management tools collect, manage, and assist in the creation of accurate citations for your research sources. They are generally quite easy to use, integrate with your web browser--where you do your work--and best of all, are FREE!

Some professors may have a preference as to which citation management tool they use and may suggest one over another. But, it's often simply a case of personal preference as to which interface you prefer.

Below you will find links to RIT Library infoguides that provide abundant information about setting up and using four of these citation management tools.

Zotero

Zotero Infoguide
Zotero is a citation management program that collects, manages, and cites research sources and allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects, and create bibliographies.

BibGuru

There are several free, online citation generators. Some are better than others! We recommend the following:

RIT Library highly recommends the new, free, ad free site, BibGuru, and provides a helpful infoguide that will assist you in learning about its many tools.

Endnote

EndNote Infoguide
EndNote is an online citation management tool that allows you to COLLECT, ORGANIZE, and FORMAT references saved from Summon, the library online catalog, and other research tools like Google Scholar.

Use this guide to familiarize yourself with the EndNote system.

You may wish to start by watching captioned streaming tutorials that walk through the process of collecting, organizing, and formatting your personal library of references in EndNote.

Mendeley

Mendeley Infoguide
Mendeley is a free reference manager that runs on a crowdsourced database of references contributed by its community of users. Mendeley works with all major operating systems and web browsers, and integrates with Microsoft Word to create accurate citations and bibliographies in any citation style.

Guidance On ChatGPT and Generative AI Citations

How To Cite ChatGPT and Generative AI Tools in MLA, APA, and Chicago

The start of 2023 brought to the public a wave of AI related tools. Depending on how you are using these tools you might need to cite them in your research. Because many of these tools are extremely new formal citation styles like MLA and APA have not yet added guidance to their published manuals.

This is common! Citation is always evolving as new types of items emerge to cite. Both MLA and APA are actual organizations which work year round to streamline and add new items to their recommended styles. The manuals for each represent the current guidance but there is a whole process before a citation style format reaches the manual.

One step in that process is interim guidance which can usually be found on the style blogs.

For example the MLA interim guidance for citing a generative AI tool that generates text like ChatGPT or one that generates a visual image like DALL-E can be found at this link on the MLA blog.

APA - How Do I Cite ChatGPT?
Guidance issued April 7, 2023 via the APA Style Blog. This guidance will most likely be added to 8th edition of the APA Manual when it is eventually published. Keep in mind the exact format might change upon publication.
MLA - How Do I Cite Generative AI Guidance (March 2023)
This MLA page covers both text and images generated by AI.
Chicago - How do I cite ChatGPT?

You can also email APA at StyleExpert@apa.org to pose a question if you do not see answers on the sites above.