Citation’s usefulness for scholarly writers is straightforward: the program helps you collect and organize pertinent information on source works for your research. Citation makes it easy to take detailed, easily retrievable research notes, and to generate accurate and complete citations for your writing, automatically.

In addition to this, you will be able to organize information that is not included in citations for your own reference purposes: keywords, notes, and reference tags can be stored along with the basic components.

Once your research notes and information on your source works is in a database, you will not have to retype them again. As you progress through your career, you will eventually build a personal database of critical source works and notes dealing with your particular interests that you can continue to draw on for your writing, teaching, and professional development. Because Citation is a database program, it will let you search notes and sources by topic, source type, date, publisher - or any other information you have entered in your records - providing valuable help during the research phase of writing, as well as helping you include properly formatted citations in your papers and articles.

The section on Database programs and databases in general presents some fundamental definitions and concepts generally associated with database software for those users not already familiar with the software and its characteristic features.