4 Resources That Will Make Citing and Referencing Easy

Citing and referencing are essential parts of one’s research paper. Students use both of them to acknowledge and respect the sources they used to provide certain information in the text.

Without proper citing and referencing it would be considered plagiarism. And while these two concepts may seem the same, they aren’t.

■ Citing is writing an exact statement or your personal vision of a certain concept. It’s used by either writing the direct quote between inverted commas or paraphrasing. For each citation, a respective source reference must be created.

■ Referencing is a detailed form of stating a resource the citation or research data was taken from. Usually, the reference list is placed at the end of a document. Each unique reference should be stated only once, while citations may be used as often as you want.

Okay, now that we cleared out the difference between them, avoiding plagiarism becomes a bit easier. But you still need to find the sources and state them appropriately. Hopefully, there are plenty of useful resources on the internet. Almost every student knows about sites where you could find an essay sample or apps that edit your essay in real-time. But most students have never heard about platforms that help with citing and referencing.

With that thought in mind, we decided to spread the word that such resources exist. And that they could help you save some precious time and avoid stress. Without further ado, let’s get into the list of the platforms that will help you out.

Citavi

One of the oldest and the most famous bibliographic and reference managing platforms on the internet. Citavi is marketed towards researchers but can be very useful for students who look for paper writing service too. It offers plenty of features to make researching as easy as possible. The first and the most significant one is the management process.

It can do everything, find the resources you need, cite them, import and export wherever you need, and make sure everything is formatted properly. You can even use it to manage research teams and the content they’re working on.

The second important feature is that you can change the way of referencing to match your needs. There are more than 30 automatic and manual options for you to choose from. It’s even possible to scan a bar code or import a PDF file.

But the best thing about Citavi is that almost everything is free. At least, on the level a student needs. Of course, some advanced features for researchers may cost a little. But you probably will never need them while writing an essay or preparing a presentation.

Zotero

An open-sourced online platform that does its best to become your personal online research assistant. It’s presented in all possible forms. A website with an online service, a browser extension, and an application for all operating systems. Yes, you can use Zotero on your phone too. But what would you use it for?

The main goal is, of course, to provide professional automated help with researching. It’s achieved by using complex software to provide resources, organize them and make citations. It utilizes every source you could ever imagine. From university libraries and large databases to newspapers and obscure articles.

But what really stands out, is the app and web extension mentioned earlier. They give students and researchers countless new opportunities. App’s personalization feature allows organizing everything the way you need it. And your personal selection of sources can be accessed from anywhere. It’s just a matter of a few clicks.

Citation Machine

Its name speaks for itself. Citation Machine comes from the developers of a popular online math solver Mathway and educational resource Chegg. The first thing that grabs your attention is the sleek interface design of the website. There aren’t tons of unknown links menus and buttons.

The only thing you see upon entering the site is 2 options: “Create citations” and “Check your paper”. And they do exactly what you would expect. The first feature allows you to create citations while you write the text. 4 main citation styles are available at your service. And if you want to stand out or have very specific writing requirements, a large library of 7000+ citation styles will give you what you need.

The “Check your paper” feature scans an already written paper for plagiarism and grammatical errors. That means you can no longer fear missing some errors while proofreading. And all the potential plagiarisms will be highlighted too. One can even paste the text directly on the front page of the resource to scan it immediately.

Mendeley

Mendeley is another titan in the research management game. It’s a reference manager, just like Citavi. Yes, they share many similar features. However, Mendeley has some aces up its sleeves too. First of all, Mendeley is famous for the management opportunities it provides. Saving and using multiple useful resources becomes really easy. They can be also organized and accessed anytime you need.

Mendeley Notebook helps to export all the important citations from your writings. Highlight any quote you need and it will be copied here. All your quotes, thoughts, and doubts are contained in a dedicated place. With this online Notebook, you’ll never encounter any troubles with finding what you need.

Making annotations becomes very easy too with the Mendeley Desktop app. One can place them directly in the text. Don’t worry, they won’t disrupt the writing, as all annotations are separated and appear in their own small tabs. Also, you can add comments and bookmarks to any text on the internet, so that you return to it later.

Summing up

As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities to make citing and referencing a much more comfortable experience. But don’t limit yourself, use these platforms for researching too. Because receiving additional knowledge and going deeper in any subject always have a positive impact on both your studying performance and personal development.

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