Citation management

A guide to saving citations and creating bibliographies from the State Library catalogue.

Your Librarian

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Caitlyn Grant
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Contact me via our online reference service citing my name and the title of this guide

Welcome

Whether you are writing an essay for school, conducting research for a university assignment or undertaking a personal or professional research project, at some point you will need to create a bibliography and cite your references. The purpose of this guide is to make the process of referencing as painless as possible by showing you how to save a citation directly from our Library catalogue or use freely accessible citation management tools to manage your references and generate a bibliography.

In this guide you will find a brief overview of several of the main citation styles, instructions for saving a citation from the Library catalogue and details for how to export citations directly into online citation management tools.

Please note: If you wish to reproduce or reference Library material in a publication or display, please state which collection an item has been sourced from, following the guidelines listed on the Citing library items page for the correct terminology to use for each collection.

Why do we reference?

When we cite our references, we are showing to our readers or listeners that we have evidence for the claims that we are making. We are also making that evidence discoverable to others, so that our our work can be verified for accuracy. When reading an argumentative piece of writing, it is a good idea to check the references to help you assess how accurate the claims are. 

Referencing is also important so you can give due credit to the creators of resources that you may have drawn on in your own work. This might be the authors of books or articles, or the artists responsible for images that you have used. 

Referencing also ensures that you and your audience can easily find any quotes or interesting pieces of information in their original form. When performing your own research, you may find that the citation list is a good jumping off point for further research. 

It is important for your citations to be written uniformly and accurately so that they are easily understandable to both yourself and to others.