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History 300: A Guide to Research: Citation

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Noodle Tools 101

Noodle Tools is the preferred tool at Andover for organizing your research, from collecting sources and compiling notes to creating a bibliography. 

1. Sign up for Noodle Tools: go to https://my.noodletools.com/logon/signin and click "Register." If you have an account from an old school, you'll need to create a new one at PA.

Note: If you are having trouble registering as an individual, make sure you are logged in to PA wireless! If you're off-campus, it's easiest to wait until you're back to sign up.

2. Create a New Project and give it a descriptive name. Choose your citation style (Chicago) and citation level (Advanced)

3. Add a citation by clicking on New Source in the top right corner when you're in your project. Choose what kind of citation you'll be making, and put the information in the boxes. Note that you won't be able to fill out ALL the boxes, just the ones you have information for! Once you know how to put the information in yourself, you can often export citations to Noodle Tools from databases or websites, or you can copy and paste. 

4. Add notecards for each source so you can keep track of your research notes and develop ideas!

To create citations, in your project, click the green New Source button. When prompted, choose the location and format that most closely matches your material. For example, if you got to a resource via the A-Z Databases list, your would choose "Databases." If you found something on the web, not through the library, make your best judgment as to whether it's from a "Website" or "Database." 

From there, choose the type of material. If you have a tertiary/reference/background source, you would choose "Reference." If you have a book (ebook or otherwise), you would choose "Book." 

Fill out the information you can find! For many fields, you won't have information to fill out. That's okay! Just skip them.

At the end, you'll have a very nicely formatted citation!

What is Chicago Style?

"The Chicago Manual of Style is an American English style and usage guide published continuously by the University of Chicago Press since 1906. Today, it is used widely in many academic disciplines and is considered the standard for US style in book publishing."

-From "The Chicago Manual of Style, explained"

More on Citations & Research

Taking good notes is an important part of your research process. In order to create your project, it's helpful to find some sources that give you an overview, and others that give you an in-depth look, at your topic. Noodle Tools allows you to easily take notes on each source and organize your research.

For primary sources that you view online, Noodle Tools sometimes doesn't give you the options you need to cite them correctly. In that case, once you've input most of the information, you will want to:

A) View the citation from the website/database to compare it to the one Noodle Tools has produced. Make changes accordingly.

B) View the correct citation format in the Chicago Manual of Style and make changes manually.