Identify knowledge (Library & Writing Centre orientation, Stage 3)

Citations tell your reader where you gathered your information, thereby demonstrating the importance of these sources to your learning and your relationships with those works—it is a way of respecting the others before you and showing gratitude for their work (Gladue, 2020, p.8). Citations tell your reader that someone else's idea is important to you because it helped you learn about or better understand something you did not think about entirely on your own. 

Consider using a citation manager to store and organize your readings and reflections. Citation managers are software that can help you:

• Collect and keep track of the articles, books, and other documents you find during your literature searches (like your own personalized library)
• Organize those citations into folders
• Read your PDFs, take notes, and extract quotations
• Automatically generate and format in-text citations and bibliographies of citations in whatever citation style you choose (eg, APA, MLA, Chicago etc).

Choosing a citation manager

There are many citation managers out there, and if you're already familiar with one, feel free to keep using it. If you're just getting started with citation managers, RRU Library recommends and supports Zotero. Some advantages of Zotero:

• free and open-source
• compatible with Word and Google Docs
• easily create group folders to share with teammates
• access your library across multiple devices or from the "cloud"
• mobile app available

Ready to get started? Our Zotero Help Guide.will help walk you through the steps of downloading, installing, and using Zotero. 

Reference

Gladue, K. (2020). Indigenous academic integrity. Taylor Institute, University of Calgary. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/Content/Resources/Academic-Integrity/21-TAY-Indigenous-Academic-Integrity.pdf

Image by Jean van der Meulen from Pixabay

As mentioned above, citation managers are a great tool to help you keep track of your readings and reflections, and they sound magical in terms of automatically creating in-text citations and references. Here's the issue: citation managers seldom provide totally correct in-text citations and references. Please treat anything a citation manager creates for you as a first draft and then check the formatting of the citations and references against correct examples, such as those you'll find by searching WriteAnswers. Ultimately, as the author, it's your responsibility to make sure the formatting in your document is correct.

Need help?

If you have questions about the correct APA Style formatting for in-text citations and references, please first search WriteAnswers by keyword (e.g., "journal article"), and if you're unable to find the information you need, please schedule a 30-minute appointment with the Writing Centre. If you're looking for help with troubleshooting Zotero, please schedule an online appointment to learn how to use Zotero. All these appointments can be scheduled by visiting Book an Appointment.