Researching Periodicals

There are online tools to help you organize citations and format your bibliography.  

Bibliographic Management Software is a broad term for programs that will save electronic citations and automatically format them according to the users' preferred style.

It is a useful tool for keeping track of many citations and saves valuable formatting time.

courtesy of the ScholarSpace at the Graduate Library.

• Citation managers are very helpful, but can sometimes be wrong. Check your citations against the proper style guidelines, just to be sure the formatting is correct.
   
• Be aware that some citation managers are accessible without a fee by being affiliated with UM  but others must be purchased (e.g. EndNote, ProCite).

When creating and compiling citations, make sure you know:

Parts of a citation for a book:

                                                                                                                                                                                          

Citation:

• The basic, necessary information needed to locate the work.
  
  The style (e.g. Chicago, MLA, APA) dictates the order and format of the information, but the
  basic elements necessary such as title, author, publication date and so on are generally universal.

In-text Citation:

• An attribution to quoted or summarized material used within the text of the paper.
  Contains a limited amount of information which varies by style.
  

Bibliography:

• List of all the citations referred to in your paper, usually at the end of the paper.
  
  MLA calls it a Works Cited page, while APA calls it References.

Annotated Bibliography:

• List of the citations along with a brief summary and evaluation of each work.