Citations are the pieces of information that point to a specific book, article, or website. Citations "give credit" to other people's ideas when you are writing and help you avoid plagiarism. They also allow others who read your work to find the original source you are quoting or paraphrasing.
Citation management tools (sometimes also described as reference management tools) enable researchers to effectively collect, organize, and cite books, articles, and a variety of other sources.
Consult these head-to-head reference/citation management tool comparisons:
This adaption of the Citation and Research Management Tools LibGuide by Marie Sciangula is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License. Re-use of this adaption by Andrew Whitis is granted under the same Creative Commons Attibution-NonCommerical 3.0 license.