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I just got done writing a ten page paper on the fall of the Western Roman Empire (which isn't terrible but I did it in one day, go figure). Because citing works is a pain in the ass, I figured I would share some of the resources I employ to make life a little easier. You've probably heard of some, if not all, of these, so feel free to add anything that you've found useful when writing essays.

http://www.bibme.org/ - Automagically creates your bibliography. While it has a manual entry mode, what really sold me was the ability to look up any book, magazine, journal, or enter any URL and it would fill in the blanks for you. The only downside is you have to double-check to make sure the formatting is right when entering webpages. However, you can download the results and it will have already put it in the proper format required for most works cited pages.

http://citationmachine.net/ - Similar to the above site, but only used for individual citations. You have to manually imput all of the info yourself, but it formats it for you, saving a lot of time.


I'll try to add some more later, but for the moment I need to get to bed. My teacher is paranoid about plagiarism so for every book we cite from we have to xerox the title page, publication page, table of contents, and the pages we quoted from. For online articles we have to print out the entire article itself, not just the page we quoted from. Seeing how we had to have ten sources (half electronic and half non-electronic), I just used about a forest's worth of paper and a Deepwater Horizon disaster's worth of ink and the last several hours printing out all of this.

Man, I hate it when I get teachers like that. You know you've got it made, however, when you have a teacher that lets you cite Wikipedia. Hardly any of them let you do that...

Why would you cite Wikipedia?

You should never cite wikipedia, but it useful as a starting point to find other resources (since, in general, wiki articles site the sources they use)