When I’m writing a document or article and I need to manage a bunch of citations, my go-to tool is Zotero. It’s an incredibly powerful citation manager that helps you collect, organize, cite, and share research – and it’s open source which means that it’s free! Zotero is perfect for large research projects where you’re researching over a period of days, weeks, months, etc. It supports thousands of citation styles, including Bluebook.
But sometimes you just want to create a quick and dirty list of citations. If you’re looking to just cite a few sources, EasyBib is not a bad choice. They teach kids to use it in elementary school.
You enter in a url, isbn, etc. to create citations one-by-one in several styles. It takes multiple clicks to generate a citation. Then you copy and paste each one individually into your document. It’s also free but is riddled with ads.
But now there is ZoteroBib – a new free, tool from the makers of Zotero. It’s like EasyBib but quicker, more powerful, and sans the obnoxious ads. As you’re researching, just enter in your url, isbn, doi, etc., and click cite. It automatically grabs the citation and adds it to your list in just one click. Like Zotero, it supports Bluebook and many other citation styles. And ZoteroBib works on any device.
Once you’ve finished compiling your list of sources, you can export your complete bibliography to your clipboard and paste into your document. Or you can easily share your list of sources by creating a link to your bibliography with a single click. This could be a very easy way for librarians to share a list of sources with faculty, etc.
From the Zotero Blog:
Powered by the same technology behind Zotero, ZoteroBib lets you seamlessly add items from across the web — using Zotero’s unmatched metadata extraction abilities — and generate bibliographies in more than 9,000 citation styles. There’s no software to install or account to create, and it works on any device, including tablets and phones. Your bibliography is stored right on your device — in your browser’s local storage — unless you create a version to share or load elsewhere, so your data remains entirely under your control.