When performing research at the graduate level, it is important to be diligent about keeping track of your sources. This can be done with pen and paper in a dedicated notebook or on index cards. Or, you might just keep an Excel spreadsheet of all of the materials you are consulting for a project.

Citation managers like Zotero, RefWorks, and Mendeley help automate the process by working with your web browser to grab the information about a source (author, title, publication, etc.) with the click of a button. They can even be integrated into word processing software to automatically generate properly formatted citations and bibliographies.