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Citation Styles

Learn how and why to cite your sources

Using Auto-citation tools in Start Your Search and other databases

Databases and search tools like Start Your Search provide tools to help you auto-generate citations for your bibliographies. These tools can be a great time-saver compared to writing your own citations from scratch, but you must take care when using them.

A screenshot of an article page in Start Your Search that shows the auto-cite tool in the top right corner.

These tools are dependent upon the metadata (i.e. the data about the article itself, such as the title, authors, etc.) provided by each journal publisher to the database. Sometimes, the way that metadata is formatted won't match with what a citation style calls for, and so the auto-citation tool will generate citations that may look OK at a glance but need correction.

An example of an auto-citation from Start Your Search. There are errors with the capitalization of the article title.

For example, note the auto-citation above. It is meant to be in APA 7th Edition style, but has one major error: every world of the article title is capitalized. In APA, only the first word of the title, the first word after a colon or semicolon, and proper nouns should be capitalized in an article title. Thus, in order to make this citation correct, you would need to change the first letter of each word (except "How" and "Libraries") to lowercase.

You may also need to check other details, like making sure author names are formatted correctly, everything that should be italicized is done so, and so on.

So if you wish to use the auto-citation feature in Start Your Search or other databases, take care and double-check them before you turn in your paper. Happy citing!