Citation styles vary widely by journal.  Check the journal's website to see if they provide citation instructions under a section typically called "Guide for Authors" or "Author instructions."  If you can't find this information on the website, use the references section of the journal article you want to model your references after as an example. Pay particular attention to the order they place the information in, whether or not they use italics or bold, how they abbreviate journal titles, and how they use punctuation.

In Rangeland Sciences you will typically use the citation style of the Society for Range Management's peer-reviewed journal Rangeland Ecology & Management. Below is a link to REM's Guide for Authors as well as a pdf of their citation guide.

Reading a scholarly article can seem daunting at first. Scholarly articles are long and have a lot of data. If you break down the article into components, it will make it easier to read and understand.

For a quick overview, click on the link below to see an example of a scholarly article and its parts.

You probably already know that you should always cite your sources when you use a direct quotation.

But as an academic writer, who synthesizes ideas from lots of places into their work, you will also need to paraphrase and summarize ideas from others -- and it is just as important that you cite those sources! 

Check out the following citation resources for tips on when to quote, summarize, or paraphrase.

For more help, consult OSU Libraries's guide to Academic Integrity.

WHAT ARE CITATION MANAGERS?

Citation management tools allow researchers to:

• Save and organize sources
• Take notes
• Create bibliographies
• Add in-text citations, footnotes or endnotes.

They work across platforms and on multiple browsers. They allow you to save all of your sources to one place, no matter where you find them.

Some citation managers also allow you to save and share your resources with others. 

WHY USE CITATION MANAGERS?

Citation management software makes it easy for you to:

• Keep all your useful sources in one place.
• Seamlessly access your saved sources during the writing process.
• Automatically generate bibliographies or works cited lists in many styles.
• Take notes on sources, and find those notes again.

ZOTERO

Zotero is a free tool you can use with almost any browser that collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use and lives in your web browser where you do your work. Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections (or groups you can share with collaborators) for different projects, and create bibliographies using Word (for Mac or Windows), Google Docs, or OpenOffice.

Learn more about Zotero by clicking on and watching the Intro to Zotero video above, going through this step-by-step guide or come to a Zotero workshop led by OSU librarians either online or in-person (see schedule).