Capstones for Social Sciences

Proper citations take time, give yourself lots of time to do them. For further guidance check out the Macalester Library's Citation Guide. 

Using a system for keeping track of the references you discover, even the ones you do not end up using for your project, can save you time when organizing your ideas, writing your paper, adding textual references, and creating a bibliography. Keeping track of where ideas and facts came from can also help you avoid unintentionally not citing a source.

Online citation management tools can be a good way to organize your references. Here are three:

RefWorks is a tool for storing and sharing your research materials, and citing them in commonly-used citation styles. To use this subscription-only citation tool you will need to create a login while you are on campus.

Zotero is an easy to use application for organizing your research materials, sharing them with collaborators, and citing them in a wide range of citation styles. It's simple to set up and begin using, and it's free! Check out their Quick Start guide to get going.

Mendeley allows you to store and organize your research materials, share them with others, and annotate documents. It is free to use.

Tips

• There are style manuals or guides for every citation style. Be sure to use the appropriate guide. It will help you with more obscure citation practices, such as interviews, full text within databases, data sets, and more.
• Look at examples for citations to find similar items. Citation is more of an art form than a science, so seeing what others have done can be very helpful.
• Do not rely solely on automated citation generators such as Zotero, RefWorks, EasyBib, etc. They all make mistakes. Many mistakes.
• When using quotations or poetry to start sections of your paper, you must include a citation. The exact form of this will vary from citation style to citation style. This source may not be in your bibliography/references--check the style manual.
• Understand how citations are used within your discipline. For example, in History, much of the scholarly conversation happens within the footnotes.
• When in doubt, cite. If you have a question about whether or not something should be cited, err on the side of citing.
• Cite yourself if you use your own previous work.
• Cite the source you use. This means if you use the print version of an article, cite that. If you use the full text version within Academic Search Premier, cite that. If you use a working paper or a pre-print version, cite that. How you do this will vary from style to style.
• You can cite sources within other sources, however the preference is to find the original for yourself and cite it directly.
• Fully cite all your data sources.
• Ask for help. Your librarians are used to working with citation styles, guides, and manuals.