What is a Style Guide and why are there so many?
A style guide is a handbook or guide that illustrates the accepted format for citing your references in term papers, theses, articles, etc.
Different citation styles are maintained for two reasons: disciplinary differences and tradition. Researchers in different disciplines cite different types of resources, and different disciplines place higher value on different criteria. For example, most researchers in the social sciences are more likely to cite a scholarly article than any other type of source, while a researcher in the humanities might need to cite a variety of source types, including archived personal letters or first-edition works. Over time, organizations like the American Psychological Association created style guides that were meant to help standardize the format of citations within their discipline, focused on the types of works most often used in their field.
The Henry Buhl Library has created a quide to help users cite the Bible, and Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, commentaries and atlasses. The site provides guidelines for citing in APA, MLA, Turabian, and Chicago styles for print and web sources.
Zotero (pronounced "zoh-TAIR-oh") is a user friendly, free, open-source program that collects, manages, and cites research sources.
Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects, and create bibliographies.
It automatically updates itself periodically to work with new online sources and new bibliographic styles