MLA, APA, Chicago, and AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Do citations and bibliography rules make you want to cry? Or perhaps you secretly love creating in text citations and want to make sure they are perfect every time. Whatever your opinion is on creating citations and bibliographies, they get easier when you use the library. You can copy and paste already created citations or utilize software that will build the citations from scratch for you. Let’s discuss your options.

Copy and Pasting Already Created Citations

EBSCOhost offers premade citations for all of its scholarly articles. You can check out EBSCOhosts different databases through our subscription database page. Once you login start searching for your articles. Once you select an article, on the right hand side of the page there will be a button that says “Cite”. Click on this button a pop up window will show you all of the different citations styles. From this point you can copy and paste to your heart’s content. A little warning from my experience, the citations offered by EBSCOhosts are not always perfect, so double check.

Building Your Citations From Scratch..(with a little help).

There are several free citations builders available on the web and today I will introduce you to EasyBib and NoodleBib.

EasyBib.com is a simple bibliographic management tool that creates citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago styles. You choose what type of citation you are building and then fill in the blanks, from there EasyBib will create your citation for you. I especially liked this feature because you could create a list and then download it to a Microsoft Word or Google document file. This download feature minimizes a lot of the time and clumsiness involved in editing if you were simply to copy and paste citations. I recommend this citation builder for younger students who are just learning citations.

Though free and easy to use this program still comes with areas for improvement. The simplicity sometimes misses the finer details necessary for Chicago or Turabian citations. Also make sure you pay close attention to font size and margin spacing when you download citations to a Microsoft Word document. If a professor or teacher specifies a certain style of paper, EasyBib may not automatically create the style you are required to make.

NoodleBib.com is more complex free bibliographic management tool that also creates MLA, APA, and Chicago styles. This software also is a fill in the blank type citation builder, though you should expect a lot more blanks than EasyBib. This citation builder is a little more time consuming, but you can expect accurate and correct citations. Though you do not get the handy downloadable feature, you can expect better results for professional style citations. This citation builder is appropriate for high school age students and above.

If you are using the two citation builders for simple print journal articles you are likely to get similar results. There are minor differences if you are using it to build a bibliography of references used from an electronic database. Be careful about what information you add into the blanks and pay attention to any side notes or pop up information. Your citations are only as accurate at the information you put into it.

If you still want more information please check the library catalog for the writing style manuals. These are always the authoritative source of creating proper citations. Happy writing!