Favorite citation generator? Most common style for citations?

[MercyA]

Title says it all. Do you have a favorite citation generator? Which citation style do you use when none is specified? (I'm thinking APA?)

DD and I both thank you! 🙂 

[EKS]

I can't stand citation generators.  They frequently make mistakes and if you never learn what's right, you'll never know what's wrong.  It's really not hard to format the reference list yourself.  The Purdue Online Writing Lab is a great resource for MLA and APA formatting.

All of the school English teachers I've encountered have had kids use MLA, probably because they were English majors.  APA is fairly common in the social sciences.  I prefer Chicago author-date myself.

[bookbard]

I think it depends on which discipline you're in. We use APA in psychology and education. I copy the citation off google scholar or Crossref Metadata Search. 

[elegantlion]

History uses Chicago-Style footnotes/endnotes, or Turabian (which is kind of Chicago lite). I also don't use generators because they are often wrong. 

English uses MLA 

Citation writing is not hard, it's tedious, but once you understanding the basic "template" and how to build around that, it's a lot easier. 

[Laura Corin]

I just write citations myself based on the library website information.  Each department that I study a module with produces a style sheet with tips for getting it right and info on the recommended style. I quite enjoy it.

[Onalulu]

easy bib.com

[MercyA]

Thanks so much, all! We used the Purdue Writing Lab site as a reference and went with MLA. 

I ordered this laminated quick guide to MLA Style for DD to use in the future:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1423248341?psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&ref_=chk_typ_imgToDp

[Clarita]

I use Chicago because I have the book. I haven't had good luck with citation generators... mostly by the time I entered in all the information I basically wrote the citation already. A lot of word processing software will alphabetize/organize the works cited bibliography page for you, so I also often use that while writing. From there I check for each place I'm submitting to how they want their format and "program" (no go into the code but just using the software's forms) my word processor to do it. It's a lot of work up front but also made my job easier later because a paper I wrote might be submitted to several magazine/journal/presentation so in the long run it saved me time. (If she's just a student and is not going to submit her papers to several publications then it's not worth the work.)  

 

[FreyaO]

As others said, this depends on the field and the requirements.

Sounds like you got it sorted and maybe it wasn't a very long or complex assignment.

But for something more long-term and expanded, reference management software is worth the learning curve and time investment.

Something like Endnote. It converts styles from X to Y, may be able to automatically import references (depends on the field and source) and, above all, very important, super handy, will automatically update the ordering and in text references when you delete, move around, insert, etc, etc, text.

 

[bookbard]

1 hour ago, FreyaO said:

Something like Endnote. It converts styles from X to Y, may be able to automatically import references (depends on the field and source) and, above all, very important, super handy, will automatically update the ordering and in text references when you delete, move around, insert, etc, etc, text.

 

I was using Endnote when I wrote my Master's thesis - and then it crashed and every single reference disappeared or glitched somehow. I had to redo them all by hand. So now I just put them in myself. Looking online, it seems that it crashes every so often - it's not just me. 

[Lady Marmalade]

The References tool in MS Word makes great citations.  

My classes this semester have all required APA style

[Laura Corin]

2 hours ago, FreyaO said:

Something like Endnote. It converts styles from X to Y, may be able to automatically import references (depends on the field and source) and, above all, very important, super handy, will automatically update the ordering and in text references when you delete, move around, insert, etc, etc, text.

 

Interesting. All the assignments I have done required references as footnotes. Microsoft Word deals with the reordering automatically as I move text around. 

[Heartstrings]

I used a website called just that, Citation Generator.  It did all styles  and remembered citations from previous sessions.  
 

Im not sure why doing it by hand would be preferred. It’s mundane work that can easily be done by machine, so why not?  Why do I need to remember where a period goes and if the year goes before or after the city and if something needs to be italicized when I can type in an ISBN or copy a URL and pop one out.  

Edited December 2, 2023 by Heartstrings

[Laura Corin]

24 minutes ago, Heartstrings said:

I used a website called just that, Citation Generator.  It did all styles  and remembered citations from previous sessions.  
 

Im not sure why doing it by hand would be preferred. It’s mundane work that can easily be done by machine, so why not?  Why do I need to remember where a period goes and if the year goes before or after the city and if something needs to be italicized when I can type in an ISBN or copy a URL and pop one out.  

For me, I  may be odd, it's a rest for the creative part of my brain. There are tiny rests throughout the essay writing as I craft footnotes, then a longer rest while I make the bibliography before my final edit. 

I'm writing an essay this weekend. 

[bookbard]

36 minutes ago, Heartstrings said:

Im not sure why doing it by hand would be preferred. It’s mundane work that can easily be done by machine, so why not?  Why do I need to remember where a period goes and if the year goes before or after the city and if something needs to be italicized when I can type in an ISBN or copy a URL and pop one out.  

Depends on what you're doing, but if you're going to marking other people's work it will be important, and I think it's good to review your own, too, in case of formatting glitches or typos. I don't think it's intrinsically important to do it by hand though, but probably good to be able to do it by hand if necessary.

[Carrie12345]

Not one of my professors has found any errors in my citations with MS Word. Not only is it ridiculously easy, you can flip it to any style. I have to use MLA for some classes and APA for others.

[elegantlion]

6 hours ago, Heartstrings said:

I used a website called just that, Citation Generator.  It did all styles  and remembered citations from previous sessions.  
 

Im not sure why doing it by hand would be preferred. It’s mundane work that can easily be done by machine, so why not?  Why do I need to remember where a period goes and if the year goes before or after the city and if something needs to be italicized when I can type in an ISBN or copy a URL and pop one out.  

For me, it's not mundane, it's detail work. Also, citation generators are often wrong. I'd still have to double check them and I'm more likely to miss an error in an automatically generated citation than I am one I wrote myself. I've used Zotero as a reference manager and it can create citations for you. The other challenge I had with that is that it transferred the citation as one block of text, not individual words (not sure how to describe the technicality), so if I needed to correct one thing, it messed up the formatting. It wasn't a simple copy and paste issue either. It was frustrating and created more work for me. 

Another reason citation geneators don't work for me is that I'm working with a lot of complex citations, like chapters in an edited volume, translations from medieval sources, or medieval primary sources, which have some specific formatting ways depending upon what information you have, don't have. 

I have a running bibliography and since my work builds from previous work, I'm often do just copy and paste the footnotes. Citations are always the last part of editing for me. 

One of my advisors could always tell when students used citation generators exclusively. Many students would just insert them without double checking, sometimes using bibliographic style instead of footnote style. 

 

Some printed citation reference manuals are a hot mess - looking at you 8th edition MLA book. Others are formatted much better, such as Turabian's A Manual for Writers - which is a form of Chicago Style. 

[sassenach]

MyBib was my favorite when I was in school. It had the formats I needed and no ads.

[WendyLady]

It's not a citation generator, but I consult Purdue Owl APA guide every time I have an APA assignment. They have examples and general guides. I can almost always find the answer to my APA questions there (if I look hard enough) though online sources are a little tricky. 

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/general_format.html

 

I have played with the Grammarly generator but I didn't feel like it was entirely right and I generally do it by hand. Also, the online library at my college lists various citation styles at the top of each article. When I copy those citations, they look strange in a Word document. I often copy the citation and paste it into a google search, the copy it again from the google search bar into my Word document, and any strange highlights or formatting are gone, letting me clean it up and add in a hanging indent and it's good to go!

[QueenCat]

I like the citation tool in MS Word. Never had an issue with accuracy.