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Citation Guide

This guide presents information and resources on APA, MLA, and Chicago styles as well as guidance on citation management programs.

Welcome to FSU Libraries' Citation Guide! In this guide you will find resources for MLA, APA and Chicago styles of citation. In addition, resources and tutorials for various citation management programs such as Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote Basic are available in this guide. 

Citation & Scholarship

Why Cite?
  • Give credit where credit is due. (It's the right thing to do.)
  • Enhance the credibility of your argument with supporting evidence.
  • Point out the dialog you are having with other scholars and their ideas.
  • Provide your reader with additional sources for further reading.
  • Avoid plagiarism: unfairly taking personal credit for other authors' ideas.
Avoiding Plagiarism

Correctly citing work is the means by which researchers and writers can avoid plagiarizing the work of others. If you have more questions about plagiarism, please visit our Plagiarism Research Guide

Citation Styles & Citation Management Programs

There are thousands of citation styles to choose from -- so how should you know which to select? Oftentimes, your instructor will assign one for you; other times, you may have the option to pick one for yourself based on the citation conventions in your field of study. Here are three of the most widely used citation styles:

For more information on these citation styles, please select the corresponding links located in the left-hand column of this guide. For more information on other citation styles, visit the Citation Styles by Disciplines page.


To help you keep track of the sources you cite and create citations in the above mentioned styles as well as many others, you can use a citation management program, like one of the following!

For more information on these programs and how to get started using them, please see the Citation Management Programs page of this guide.

Florida State Universities’ access to the state-wide RefWorks subscription ended on December 31, 2020. As of this writing (January 2021), users are able to access their RefWorks accounts to transfer information out, however we do not know how long this functionality will be available for since FSU Libraries no longer supports this platform. We encourage you to migrate your resources to another citation manager such as those covered in this guide.

The decision to cancel the RefWorks subscription was based on tightening budgets and the availability of high quality, free or low cost alternatives. Instructions on transferring data from RefWorks to Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote are available. See the RefWorks Transition page of this Guide for more info.

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