Use your phone to help write a research paper!!

It's not unusual for people to use their cameras to snap photos of pages in a book or journal for research purposes, but now there's a new smartphone app that turns your phone's camera into a citation generator.

With Quick Cite you use the camera on your smartphone to scan the bar code on a book. The service then e-mails you a citation for the book in one of four styles, including APA and MLA, that you can then paste into your paper. This app is available for both Android and Apple products.

Want more info? Go to Quick Cite

New Facebook feature to cite books!

There's a new application you can add to your Facebook account that can really speed up the process of creating work cited pages.

When you type in the name of a book in this widget, called CiteMe, it produces a perfect citation in all the popular documentation styles. As an added bonus you can also use this feature to search for books at the Ritz Library too!!

Interested? Once logged onto Facebook, seach for the term "citeme". At the CiteMe information page, follow the instructions for installatiing the widget and you're good to go.

Citation tool with a twist

Zotero is an interesting and comprehensive citation management tool. Unlike citation generators which format a citations for you, zotero works off the principle of capturing and storing data in a filing system as you find usable research sources. It allows you to attach notes to your data, tag your data, and keep track of documents as you work with them. You can also link to web pages and attach files to the citation information. Little "sticky" notes can even be created.

Ever wonder how to cite a youTube source? Zotero can help. Found a great source of books in a catalog and you want to store the list? Zotero can help. Need to review podcast information? Zotero can help. Database, artwork, radiocasts, film, blog entry, bills - zotero can help.

Getting started is a bit confusing, but there are videos online that can help. To utilize zotero, you must be running Firefox. Zotero is a Firefox extension and can be downloaded from here. From the zotero website itself, click on ztour to get a glimpse of how to use the tool. Also, youTube has more than one helpful video posted on zotero. Try this link here.

When it's time to create your bibliography, zotero can be used with document management software such as MS-Word or Google docs to build your citations. Additional plug-ins may be necessary. Accessed web pages can be archived through the "create new item from current page" icon which will capture a screen shot of the page you were looking at. So take a look at zotero, and give it a try. You may find it to be a very helpful citation management tool.

Did you know...?

For every paper that you write, you need to provide accurate verifiable sources. Those sources must be correctly cited in your paper in order to receive credit. The DCC library has put together comprehensive citation tools that you can use for your bibliography.

Two of the most common formats for Works Cited pages are: MLA and APA. The style that you choose depends upon the requirements of your professor.

From our website, you can also access Citation Generators, which are online tools that you can use to correctly generate your information. For example, KnightCite can be used to easily create a bibliographic entry for any type of media item: books, periodicals and multimedia such as cartoons and DVDs, including more obscure citations such advertisements, maps, and songs. It's a simple form-driven website that allows you to enter all available information and then generates the appropriate citation for that information.

Remember to select which citation style you need before starting.

Feel free to ask the Reference Librarians questions about using the citation guides and code generators or make use of the help available in the Writing Center.