Now that you've had some time to enter records in your database, let's write a bibliography. Then we'll learn how to insert citation "keys" in your papers.

Writing a bibliography with Citation is easy. Here's how you do it:

1. Start your word processor with a blank document, and then start Citation.
2. On the Citation menu, click Generate, Bibliography from Datafile.
3. Change the "Publishing Style" option on the dialog to MLA, Chicago, APA - or whichever reference style you use most often.
4. Click OK. Citation will write a bibliography for all the source works in your datafile to your document.

Well done! You've just written your first bibliography of your own research sources with Citation. -A lot easier than typing it by hand, isn't it? Just think. You won't ever have to retype or reformat another one of the entries in your datafile, ever again.

You will probably have noticed, however, that the "Generate Bibliography" feature writes references for all the bibliographic records in your datafile - which is good for course materials or a prospectus, but not what you need for papers or articles. When you are writing papers, you will want to cite just those sources you've consulted.

With Citation, this is easy. There are a couple of ways to do this.

If you are working on a paper for a course or conference presentation, you can set the style in the Preview box, and just insert the formatted citation into your document (Click here for step by step instructions). Generally speaking, though, it is more efficient to include "citation keys" in your document that will let you write footnotes (or author-date) and a reference list at the same time - and include specific page references.

Let's try working with Cite (or "Access") keys in a word processing document.

First, you'll need to put "cite" or "access keys" in your document - links to records in your datafile, using, once again, the Access Phrase ID. The citation keys should be inserted at the places in your document where you would normally type a footnote or author-date cite. (Click here to look over the CitationHelp section on citing sources).

Ready to do this yourself? Good! Here's how:

1. Open another blank document with your word processor, and type a sentence or two (pretend you're writing a paper). Watch where the cursor is - that's where the Access key will be inserted.
2. On the Citation menu, click View, Short List.
3. Highlight one of the bibliographic works in the Short List, and then click the Cite button. Citation will insert a citation access key for the work into your document.

The access key, you may have noticed, is just the CiteKey (or, in version 8, the Access Phrase) for the source work, enclosed in curly braces. It should look something like this: {Smith 1990}

If you'd like to have a better look at what a document with these citation keys looks like, open the document we used for the test drive:

c:\citation\samples\essay.rtf or view a graphic of this file

When you've finished looking at the document, let's return to your own document and type a few more sentences. Add a few more citation keys for different works in your datafile. In one or two of them, you should include a specific page reference, like this: {Smith 1990: 22}

You can also incorporate excerpts in your note records, along with the CiteKeys from the source work to write a proper reference!

1. Repeat the steps above, but this time, find an entry in the Short List for a Note.
2. Click the Cite button.

Citation will transfer the excerpt, along with the Cite key to your document.

Note: You might want to use your word processor to change the indentation for the excerpts. Use Copy and paste to transfer comments to your word processing document.

Now lets generate citations for the works cited in this document:

1. First, save the document.
2. On the Citation menu, click Generate, Citations for document.
3. Change the settings on the Generate Citations dialog to:

   Intext citations: Short Form, APA style
   Reference list: Alphabetized, APA Style
   

   (Click here to see what the Generate Citations dialog should look like.)

4. When you've changed the settings, click OK.

About a moment after that click, you should be looking at a document with Author-Date-Page citations in the text, and an alphabetized Reference List.

Nifty, yes?

Okay. Time for some technical details. This is what happens when you run Generate Citations for Document: Citation makes a copy of the document with the citation keys, and searches your datafile to find all the works you cited. When it's found them, it replaces the citation keys with Short Form (author-date) citations, and then writes a Reference list at the end of the document.

So here's an important pointer: when you are working with your own papers, you'll want to make certain you always save the copy with the references with a new name - don't overwrite the document with the Access keys! You can use it to rewrite the references after you've made changes - or if you need to do the references in a different style.

Use you word processor now to go back to the document with the citation keys. If you like, you can rewrite the intext citations and references now, in a different style. Citation supports over 1000+ different citation styles, and all reference formats:

There's quite a bit of information in the CitationHelp files describing the different types of references you can write with Citation:

• Footnotes (with or without a bibliography)
• Endnotes (with or without a bibliography)
• Author-date intext citations with an alphabetized Reference List
• Author-page intext citations with an alphabetized list of Works Cited
• Numeric with a reference list in order of appearance in document
• Alphanumeric
• Publishing styles supported by Citation

By now, you know just about everything you need to know to work with Citation. Basically, you're an expert!

The thing is, Citation itself isn't all that complicated. It can save you valuable time, of course, (so you'll have more time to focus on your writing) - but the real "trick" to making the program useful is: making it a habit. Getting into a routine of using Citation whenever you finish reading a piece for your research.

A. Enter a bibliographic record for everything you read.
B. Enter note records for all the passages you underline.
C. Keep Citation open when you are writing to make sure you cite sources correctly.

Here's a couple of additional exercises we think you might want to browse through:

• From the Citation Handbook: Building & writing a reading list
• From the Citation Workshop: Working with subsets
• Using BookWhere and Citation to research a topic

And some additional materials you might want to read through:

• Citation Handbook: Using Citation to Streamline the Research Writing process.

For the curious and adventurous amongst you: there are a lot of other nifty features in Citation - for selecting subsets, for instance, finding duplicates - writing custom format files, that sort of thing.

Don't hesitate to browse through the CitationHelp system - and stop by the website every now and then to check out the CitationTips section.