Each academic discipline uses its own citation style. You may be familiar with APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian. APA is widely used across the social sciences while MLA and Chicago are typically used in the humanities. The sciences, however, tend to use the citation style of their foremost professional organization. If you're not sure which citation style to use for an assignment, ask your instructor!
The most commonly used citation style in chemistry is the American Chemistry Society (ACS) citation style. The most current edition of this style is the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication (2020), an (expensive) online subscription. Please refer to their quick guide for free access to the most recent style guidance.
The ACS Style Guide, 3rd Edition by Citation tools allow you to save and organize your research. They also let you create formatted bibliographies in Word.
Downloadable as a standalone program from OIT, EndNote is a powerful citation tool for organizing your research and creating formatted citations. In addition to the standalone option, you can create an EndNote Web account.
This feature will look for and then download full-text pdfs of articles in your references. You will have to authenticate with your NetID so that EndNote knows which journals you have access to through Duke Libraries.
Downloadable as a standalone program or a Firefox extension, Zotero is designed to store content in any format, including PDFs, images, audio and video files, and snapshots of web pages. Zotero operates with thousands of sites, and automatically indexes your library for ease of access. Zotero is open access (free!).
Free PDF and reference manager. Read, annotate, organize, and collaborate on research projects with others using Mendeley.
