TSEM 102 Notable Music Makers: Nina Simone (Rickelton/Thomas)

Citation is not just a boring exercise required by your professors. It is a crucial part of the research process for four reasons:

1. Citation is how you show your work. This is how you let your readers know you have done the necessary research to write with authority about your topic.
2. Citation is how you invite others to follow. Readers should be able to use your citations to do their own research, allowing them to add, complicate, agree, or disagree. 
3. Citation is how you give credit. Your ideas are built on the work and ideas of others. Part of being an honest, ethical researcher is acknowledging what you owe to others in specific and visible ways. Citation is the most powerful way to do that.
4. Citation is a celebratory act. It provides space to honor particularly innovative or interesting work by demonstrating your engagement with it in your own writing. 

If citing in CMS style has you confused, take a look at these guides for citing resources in your research paper.

Citation managers are great tools for keeping your research organized. You can use them to keep track of references you want to cite in your paper, share resources with your peers, and automatically generate citations for you. These tools can streamline your research process and save you a lot of time. However, make sure you double check any automatically generated citations for accuracy -- they can sometimes have minor errors.