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A Guide to Good Referencing Skills

Generate Citations

With a citation generator, you enter your source bibliographic information in order to produce a citation in your selected format that you can copy and paste into your paper. There are lots of free citation generators on the web to choose from, here is a selected list of citation generators:

If you have many references to handle and hope to reuse them in your future work, we suggest you use reference management software instead.

Reference management software

  • lets you create your own database of the references you collect while searching the literature
  • has a plug-in to automatically format the citations in a Word, and produce a list of references at the end of the document formatted in the style of your choice (e.g. APA, IEEE, MLA). 
  • share your references with your teammates or collaborators

HKUST Library subscribes to RefWorks. Register a new account using your HKUST email (check Quick started guide).

Other free reference management software include:

Getting started with RefWorks

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