Practice Safe Writing!
Citing the works of authors that you use to form your own research is a critical part of the writing and research process. Citation provides evidence to back up our own ideas and statement. It demonstrates where our work fits into the greater body of knowledge. And it gives proper credit where credit is due.
Read these best practices to avoid accidental plagiarism and check out these proper paraphrasing techniques.
Cornell University's Plagiarism Tutorial and Code of Academic Integrity
Endnote Licenses
The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and the College of Human Ecology (CHE) provide Endnote software to faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students affiliated with those colleges. For more information, see the following links:
Zotero
Zotero is a popular free open source citation management tool that makes saving and citing online resources, including websites, YouTube videos, news articles, and scholarly database results, a breeze. Some of Zotero's strengths include its ability to capture a multitude of resource types with the click of a button, and its group library function, with no limit on group membership. For more about Zotero, see this guide.
Creating an Annotated Bibliography with Zotero
1. Open preferences, and select Cite>Styles. Then, select "get additional styles" link at bottom, and find APA 6th (annotated bibliography). Download and open--this will automatically save the style to Zotero.
2. Highlight the references you want to include in your annotated bibliography, right click and select "create bibliography from items." Then paste into your Word doc.
3. Be sure to put your annotations in the abstract field for each included citation. If there are actual abstracts in that field, you can cut and paste them into the notes field.
Mendeley
Mendeley is online software for use in citation management.
Important features and things you need to know about Mendeley:
- Mendeley is one of the primary citation manager for students in science and engineering fields
- The basic version is free, premium add-ons are available that will give you more online storage space or which can enable you to collaborate and share your references with large numbers of other people.
- There is a desktop client and a mobile app, both of them online-enabled - Once you've created a new account, you will probably want to download the desktop client to your personal computer. This will enable you to begin adding references and creating bibliographies in no time. You also can add Mendeley's app to your smartphone and/or tablet (the iOS version is here and Scholarley is Mendeley's unofficial Android app). All instances of Mendeley--client or app--keyed to a single user will share data, enabling you to access your citations anywhere.
- It supports group work - You can share your citations and lists with up to 3 other users (sharing with more requires purchasing a premium add-on).
- Uploading is easy! - You can simply drag and drop a PDF of an article to Mendeley and it will automatically extract much of the necessary citation information from the text (we'd recommend that you review it to make sure it's correct though - author name, article name, etc.).
- Mendeley will format your citations for you in a variety of styles