What are citation managers?
Citation managers are great tools for organizing your references and producing beautifully formatted bibliographies. Explore the Citations and Bibliographies Guide or the links below to learn more and download a citation manager. The university and university libraries make these products available at no cost to current NU faculty, staff, and students.
- EndNoteCourtesy of NU, create your own citation database on your computer and auto-format citations within your papers. Particularly strong on the journal article front, since EndNote includes thousands of journal styles, allowing you to change formatting in one simple step.
- MendeleyFree software that will help manage research, annotate PDFs, and format citations. Mendeley has both a cloud-based and desktop component.
- RefWorksSimilar to EndNote though considered slightly more user-friendly, lets you create your own citation database on the RefWorks company website, and use that database to auto-format citations within your papers. Has many journal styles, though not as many as EndNote.
- ZoteroZotero allows you to collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Add sources right from your browser as you move through library databases or the Web.
- BibTex and LaTexBibTeX is both a bibliographic flat-file database file format and a software program for processing these files to produce lists of references.
Citing your Sources
Check our pages on academic integrity and citations and bibliographies.
The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) is a good resource for all aspects of paper writing, including citation and bibliography.
Citing AI-generated content
A variety of guidelines are emerging on how to cite or credit the parts of your work generated by artificial intelligence and large language model tools.
Northeastern offers an Insider's Guide for students (PDF) and an Overview and guide for instructors (PDF) on the responsible use of AI at the University.
Practices and standards for citing and crediting the contribution of AI in your work vary between style guides, so always consult your instructor, advisor, or editor to be sure of expectations for your academic work and research.
- AMA: Acknowledgement of the use of Artificial Intelligence and Language Models (Opens in new window)Guidance from the American Medical Associaton
- APA: How to cite ChatGPT (Opens in new window)From the American Psychological Association style blog. If using the scite.ai website, the vendor/author is Scite, and the AI tool is called "Assistant by Scite".
- Chicago: How do you recommend citing content generated by AI? (Opens in new window)From the Chicago Manual of Style
- IEEE How to Cite AI-generated Content (Opens in new window)For engineering and technology publications, this is guidance from the IEEE.
- MLA: How do I cite generative AI in MLA Style? (Opens in new window)From the Modern Language Association Style website.
Journal Citation Reports
The established source for locating information on journal rankings and impact factors is Journal Citation Reports, accessible through ISI Web of Science.
Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 11,000 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 80 countries. It is the only source of citation data on journals, and includes virtually all areas of science, technology, and social sciences. Journal Citation Reports can show you the:
- Most frequently cited journals in a field
- Highest impact journals in a field
- Largest journals in a field
Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison.
- Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate) This link opens in a new windowJournal rank and impact factor information for an individual journal or a group of journals by subject. For subject searches, sort all journals in that subject by impact factor, total cites, immediacy index, etc.
You should not depend solely on citation data in your journal evaluations. Citation data are not meant to replace informed peer review. Careful attention should be paid to the many conditions that can influence citation rates such as language, journal history and format, publication schedule, and subject specialty.
The number of articles given for journals listed in JCR include primarily original research and review articles. Editorials, letters, news items, and meeting abstracts are usually not included in article counts because they are not generally cited. Journals published in non-English languages or using non-Roman alphabets may be less accessible to researchers worldwide, which can influence their citation patterns. This should be taken into account in any comparative journal citation analysis.