There are various bibliographic management programs for maintaining your own personal database of references (see links below). These programs allow you to import references from article databases or catalogs, organize your references into folders according to your needs, insert references into your research papers, generate bibliographies (lists of references) for your research papers, and specify a citation style to instantly format your bibliography.

Carefully proofread when you use bibliographic management programs to create a bibliography; sometimes there are formatting problems with proper nouns or with words that have special characters (diacritics).

What is a "citation style"?
You are probably already familiar with the elements of a typical article citation: author, article title, journal, publication year, volume, issue, pages. The order and formatting of these elements into a citation is the citation style.

Some scientific societies have defined their own particular citation style, and most science journals have a preferred citation style. You can also consult the style guides listed below.

Commonly used style guides are listed below. (Some links go to the library's print copy, some go to online resources.)