Finished your term paper...and now you have to cite your sources? We can show you how!

Here are a couple of cool tools for students and others who may be faced with the tedious chore of typing up a list of citations for term paper bibliographies or other types of formal reports.

Knight Cite http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/ and Son of Citation Machine http://citationmachine.net/ both provide foolproof templates for easily creating perfectly formatted citations.Essentially, here’s how it works for both tools.

First, click on the formal “citation style” (APA, MLA, Chicago etc) you’ve chosen for your bibliography. Next, select the specific “resource type” (book, journal, web document etc) for each item to be included in your bibliography. Then type the information into the boxes provided (author, title, publisher etc) and click on the “submit” button. The citation tool creates a citation with accurate formatting and punctuation on the next page. Simply copy the citation and paste it into the Word document that will be your bibliography.

Incidentally, both of these tools can also be accessed from the Otis Library’s webpage under Resources and logging into ICONN.org with your library card’s barcode number. Then click on “Other Useful Resources” from the ICONN homepage and then “Citing Sources” to find both citation tools. Give them both a try and let us know what you think.