Managing citations can be like herding cats! It’s impossible to keep track of them all, they have a mind of their own, are beholden to no one and hide in the most unlikely places!
Thankfully, there are many tools which allow you to manage your cats references better: Zotero, RefWorks, Endnote and many more. See our very useful Managing Your References LibGuide.
Beyond that there are also tools to help you generate a citation in a particular style. Library discovery tools (like SOLO) and many databases (e.g. Bibliography of British and Irish History) offer you choice how to format your reference and then copy or export it. Remember, though, that you are still responsible for the accurate presentation of the citations. If you are a student, make sure you know what the tutors expect from you. If you are researcher, publishers will give their own preferred styles. The beauty of using reference management software is that you can easily convert them into other styles.
Oxford history students, check out the History Faculty guidance on the presentation of a dissertation or thesis first and early on in your research so that you start off from a good place.
Oxford researchers already have access to Cite Them Right – and now also to the online Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed).
The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) is the most frequently used citation style in the Humanities, esp. the Notes and Bibliography system. It is an authoritative and popular reference work for writers, editors, proof-readers, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers. The 18th edition is most extensive revision in two decades. Major changes include updated and expanded coverage of pronoun use and inclusive language, revised guidelines on capitalization, a broader range of examples, new coverage of Indigenous languages, and expanded advice on making publications accessible to people with disabilities.
The Manual’s traditional focus on nonfiction has been expanded to include fiction and other creative genres on topics such as punctuation and dialogue, and its attention to the needs of self-published authors has also widened.
The guide gives examples for citations in various instances: Bibliography & footnotes or Author-Title styles. It also clearly marks up changes. So even if you are a seasoned CMOS user, this resource is still useful to keep up-to-date and follow the latest standards.
Useful links
- Cite Them Right
- Chicago Manual of Style
- Managing your References (LibGuide)
- For history students: History Faculty guidance on the presentation of a dissertation or thesis
Do get in touch with us (reference-management@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) if you have any problems getting access. The login button at the top is only for users with individual subscriptions, not an institutional ones such as ours.
The only problem with the Chicago MofS is that it doesnt work in Oxford ! It is, as the name implies, Americal. Within the Ring Road, we have our own Oxford Manual of Style / Hart’s Rules.