Use OSU Libraries' Citations 101 LibGuide to learn how and why scholars cite their sources:

• To leave a trail for future scholars to follow.
• To portray themselves as creative, thorough, flexible thinkers.
• To give credit to others for their ideas.

You can go step by step through all of the pages in this guide for a thorough overview, or use the navigation at the left to skip to a particular topic.

Your librarian, Laurie Bridges, recommends that you use Zotero to manage your citations. What is Zotero? Zotero is a free tool that collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use and lives in your web browser where you do your work. Zotero can be downloaded as a StandAlone version that works with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, or downloaded as a Firefox extension. In this tutorial I will be using images from an installation of StandAlone Chrome, but other browser versions are very similar. 

Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes, and images to your citations, organize them into easily searchable collections for different projects, and create bibliographies using Word (for Mac or Windows) or OpenOffice using any of over 8000 citation styles. 

References can be added to a Zotero library in many different ways:  directly from databases, journal websites, Google Scholar or the library catalog, by reference file import (for example from an EndNote library), by dragging in PDFs from your hard drive, and by entering them manually.

OSU Libraries' LibGuide for Zotero provides online instruction for using Zotero. In addition, OSU librarians offer Zotero workshops every quarter.