Bibliography management tools (also known as citation or reference management tools) help you organize your research sources and generate bibliographies in multiple citation formats.
Stanford University Libraries support the following bibliography management tools:
Choosing a citation style
For most papers, you will need to format your bibliography according to the citation style specified by your instructor or publisher. Some of the commonly used citation styles include:
- MLA (Modern Language Association)
- APA (American Psychological Association)
- Chicago (The Chicago Manual of Style)
For more information about citation styles see: Working with Citations, Purdue Online Writing Lab and the Plagiarism section of the Stanford University Honor Code.
Choosing a citation management tool
All of the citation tools will help you organize your research references and will work with word processing programs to format in-text citations and create bibliographies. To choose a tool, one method is to try out each one and see if it works smoothly with the databases and webpages that you use most often, with the word processing software that you prefer, and with the hardware or device on which you will do most of your work.
The following comparison charts may also help you decide which tool to try first:
Need more help?
For more help or to schedule a workshop for your cohort, email the library's bibliographic management experts.
