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Geoscience: Citation Help

How to cite?

The purpose of this page is to assist you in formatting citations and creating your bibliography. There are many different formats to use when citing a source in a paper. 

  • If you are writing a paper for a class, you should use the format recommended by your professor.
  • If you are writing a paper for publication, you should use the format recommended by the publisher.

If you have any questions, problems, or comments about citations or about the tools recommended in this guide, please contact a librarian or the Information Desk.

GSA Style Guide

The Geological Society of America Style Guide is often used by Geoscience students to format their manuscripts, citations and reference lists. You should check with your professor to make sure this is the format you are supposed to use. The following guide is a quick reference guide to the GSA format. If you need additional help, please contact a librarian.

AGU Style

Beginning in August 2017, the American Geophysical Union adopted APA style across all its journals for referencing and grammatical style guidelines. The links below provide more information about this change and a guide to using APA style. If you need assistance learning to use APA style, please ask a librarian.

Mendeley

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

  • Automatically generate bibliographies
  • Collaborate easily with other researchers online
  • Easily import papers from other research software
  • Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
  • Access your papers from anywhere online
  • Read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app

Zotero

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.   

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