LibGuides: United Lutheran Seminary Writing Center: Citing Your Research

Keeping Track of Your Research

There are several useful, freely-available tools to help you manage your research projects. If you start using one of these tools early in your studies, they will become invaluable when it's time to write your dissertation.

Zotero is a freely-available web app and desktop software for all stages of your research. It allows you to group your references and downloaded articles around your own topic areas with your own notes so that you can then come back use them in your projects.
Microsoft Office has tools integrated in Word that allows you to cite articles and build a bibliography. DO NOT USE MICROSOFT's BIBLIOGRAPHY, AUTOMATIC CITATION, OR TABLE OF CONTENTS BUILDING TOOLS. They are inaccurate and are near impossible to resolve without re-typing every single footnote, bibliography entry, and table of contents page manually..

While these tools can simplify some of your work, it's still important for you to know how cite, format, and build a bibliography manually, as these tools will make mistakes, particularly when they import citations into the database and when presenting the final format in Microsoft Word.

Citation Tools

We recommend that you purchase the 9th edition (or newer) of A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Turabian) at the beginning of your studies at ULS so that you can refer to it every time you are completing a research paper.

If you need to cite something more complex, you can also refer to Chicago Manual of Style Online , as Turabian is a simplified version of Chicago.

Chicago Manual of Style Online
Purdue OWL offers tips on formatting your citations.
SBL Handbook of Style abbreviations are available at this link.
KnightCite Citation Service A free service maintained by Hekman Library at Calvin College, this site is a good resource for making bibliographies.
Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Policies Stanford's website for information about copyright and fair use. This information can help you determine what can be considered fair use.

Zotero Reference Management Software

Zotero is an open source citation management software that can be very helpful in keeping track of your sources.

The land on which United Lutheran Seminary sits, and which stretches between its two campuses, is tribal land, inhabited originally by the Lenni Lenape, the Susquehannock, and the Seneca tribes. We honor those original caretakers of this land, and we pay respect to the original inhabitants of what we now call Pennsylvania. Acknowledging this history is consistent with the seminary’s commitment to welcome and equity, which calls us in Christ to repentance, reconciliation, and wholeness. Even though the sad history of colonization cannot be undone, this land acknowledgement is one small way for us to remember what happened here, to understand our part in this story, and to develop a more healthy relationship with the land and its original inhabitants.