Citations and Style Manuals
Citations/references/footnotes are the way scholars indicate what resources they have used and give credit to the work/ideas of other scholars. Publishers and instructors will require that your citations be in a particular format--and there are many. Fortunately, a few will suffice for much of your work. Here are some of the more popular ones:
The Chicago Manual of Style is used by many publishers and disciplines such as history.
The MLA Handbook is popular in the humanities.
The Publication Manual of the APA is often used in the social sciences.
You will find that these works also offer many other wonderful suggestions to help you in your writing.
Harvesting Citations
Searchworks and many other databases you will use allow you to get a simple citation by using a "CiteThis" feature or gather more information by using a Send to/Export feature to send records to bibliographic management tools such as Refworks or EndNote. You can also use resources such as Zotero or Mendeley to gather information including citations. For more on these, see the guide to Bibliography Management.
