[Post I made on our NEA and Coursework Team for teachers explaining the two tools]

Tool 1: ZoteroBib (short projects and small bibliographies)

• ZoteroBib is an online citation generator. I use ZoteroBib with my Y10 HPQ students. It is relatively quick to pick up and easy enough for GCSE students to use.
• You can paste a URL or ISBN into it, and it will have a go at generating the bibliography entry and in-text citation for you. It then allows you to edit/correct them. There is no need to create an account, and it does not save your results (although they are cached locally) so results should be copied out into a Word document.
• The quality of these auto-generated references is variable, and students need to be taught how to edit them. It is still a better start to the process than Word, which gives you nothing! Book references are often perfect but YouTube video references are usually poor, with other websites and news sources are somewhere in between. See Quickstart Guide for details.

Tool 2: Zotero (full version) (longer projects and larger bibliographies)

• Zotero is a citation manager. It is a steeper learning curve (but relatively easy for anyone who has already used ZoteroBib so that can be a good stepping stone). It is more useful for students with their own laptops because it works best with (free) software downloaded, so I use it with my Y12 EPQ students. It is open-source and compatible with virtually everything (Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android) and its plug-ins run with a wide variety of browsers. Students do need to create an account, but this is free, asks for fairly minimal information and is very easy.
• The two main advantages of the full version are:
  • it allows you to store and organise all your references in different folders so that they are just there and ready to use when it is time to write.
  • it has integrated word processor plug-ins for Word, LibreOffice and GoogleDocs that allow you to ‘cite as you write’ and auto-generate bibliographies in the same way that the Word tools do.
  • it has browser plug-ins that allow you to save websites to Zotero at the click of a button. Students still need to check and edit them for accuracy (see Quickstart Guide).
• My support materials are still evolving and I plan to post more here later in the year.

Which citation style to choose?

To make life easier for all of our students and prevent confusion, I have recommended that our school sticks to just two citation styles.

• For most applications, I feel that an in-text style is the best option. I suggest American Psychological Association 6th Edition (you will need to go into “Other citation styles” and search for it). The reason I prefer this to 7th edition is that it still includes the “date accessed” for most websites. This is still currently a JCQ requirement (although they don’t seem to enforce it) so it helps us to stay within the rules. I’m really not a fan of MLA (the default) because in-text citations don’t include the publication date, which seems quite a fundamental part of the citation to me.
• If your exam board or moderator requires a footnote style (as is common in History) then I suggest Chicago Manual of Style 18th Edition (Notes and bibliography) but I don’t have strong feelings about this so let me know if you think we should choose a different one and I’ll update the advice. I strongly suggest that if you are recommending a footnote style you also recommend that students install the app and plug-ins as that will manage the complexities automatically for them of what to do if you reference the same source twice on the same page.

Note some interesting 2023 research by Mendeley into commonly used citation styles has APA way out at the front on 56%  – it wasn’t a fair comparison for footnote styles though because they had only been released on the platform the previous month!