Citation Managers are tools that allow you to:

• Automatically save the bibliographic information of sources you'd like to cite in your papers, including the title, author, and publication date.
• Use the saved bibliographic information to automatically generate in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies in any citation style.
• Keep track of and annotate PDFs and other documents associated with your sources.
• Share your sources with others.

There are many reasons not to cite sources by hand:

• It's time consuming.
• With footnotes or numbered styles, adding one to the middle of your paper will require you to change the number of every citation after it.
• If you delete an in-text citation, you'll need to remember to delete the corresponding entry in your bibliography.

However, you should absolutely know how to read a citation to ensure that your citation manager captured all the relevant information without making any mistakes. Here's an example of a bibliography entry for a journal article cited in APA 7:

• Author Last Name, Initials. (Year of publication). Title of article. Name of Journal, volume(issue), page range.
• Mann, S. A. (2011). Pioneers of U.S. ecofeminism and environmental justice. Feminist Formations, 23(2), 1–25.

If you'd like examples of sources cited in different styles, you can consult Sound Writing, our student writing handbook, or use one of the Librarian-curated documents below for the style you're using: