Citing Your Sources

Check our pages on avoiding plagiarism and citations and bibliographies.

If you're not sure which citation format to use, please check with your instructor.

The usual styles in the Health Sciences are APA and AMA.

Below are webpages containing more information for each style.

APA: Purdue OWL or APASyle.apa.org (from the American Psychological Association, contains all aspects of APA Style)

AMA: AMA Manual of Style (American Medical Association online databases covering style book) - a library subscription

Citation organization/management

By now you have probably heard of citation management programs, sometimes called reference managers. The most common ones are EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley but there are others. There are also tools that will format one citation at a time but don't store and organize like these others do.

Your instructor or group member may have a preference for one. These tools will save you time and help with formatting for both in text (in your paper) and creating bibliographies/reference lists.

Adding citations to a citation/reference manager

  • When in a database and saving articles, look for a button or text that indicates "save",  "export" or "download" your citations. In some cases it may use words like save to "Citation Manager."
    • occasionally the name of your program will be an option
  • While sorting through your results and selecting articles, save them to a folder or file (whatever the database calls them, clipboard in PubMed). This will have your selections to them save in a file to import into your reference manager program.

Already have a pdf saved on your computer? Many will allow you to drag and drop it in the program. It will read the citation components and add them appropriately.

Other reasons to use Zotero, EndNote or Mendeley

  • You can manually add citations, maybe a pamphlet or a book that is just easier this way.
  • Select citations to create a bibliography and have it formatted automatically in the style of your choice.
  • Enter in-text citations as you type your paper using the Word addon/plugin provided by the program.
    • Note: You have to either download or connect this to your word program first. 
  • Share your citations and bibliographies easily with the share options.