LibGuides: Ocean and Earth Sciences: Citing Sources

Why Cite?

Using someone else's work without citation is plagiarism and may have serious consequences.

Any time you incorporate someone else's ideas, words, or data into your paper or presentation, you must cite them. These ideas may not only come from books and journal articles, but from conversations, images, multimedia, speeches, blogs, etc. They need to be cited for several reasons:

to give credit to the authors or creators of those sources or ideas
to allow your readers to find and benefit from the exact sources you used
(in a college paper or project) to let your professor know how you arrived at your conclusions

For general guidance, see the ODU Libraries guide to citing sources (linked below). If you're unsure, ask your professor which style is preferred.

Cite Your Sources
Created by ODU Librarians. Includes tips and resources for all of the most used writing styles.

Citation Management Software

Citation management software are tools for acquiring, organizing and managing references. There are many citation management programs; below highlights a few.

The ODU Libraries often hosts workshops for EndNote and Zotero. Please check our calendar for upcoming workshops.

EndNote
EndNote is a tool for acquiring, organizing and managing citations. This is a helpful guide for using EndNote. At ODU, EndNote is free.
Mendeley
Free tool that makes it easy to keep your collection of PDFs organized. It takes PDFs, extracts author/title/source information, renames and organizes them, and syncs them to free online storage space. It also includes a PDF reader that allows highlighting and annotations.
Zotero
Zotero is a free, open-source citation management software that uses a web browser extension to save screenshots, full-text PDFs, and citation information from websites, databases, library catalogs, and other search tools with a single click. This is a helpful guide for using Zotero.