One of my standard lesson plans at the beginning of each school year involves research and citation. I take my students down to the library where the librarian and I review with students a variety of research tools. Students are very good at finding information, but they almost always struggle with creating properly formatted citations. Fortunately, there are many free websites that students can use to get help properly formatting their bibliographies.

Ottobib and Bibomatic both use ISBN numbers find books and format citations. Those are both good, easy to use tools, but often students will need help formatting citations from other sources therefore students may want to try Carmun, Citation Machine, Bibme.

Applications for Education
Unlike some bibliography creation tools all five of the websites I’ve mentioned provide citation formatting in APA and MLA styles. While these tools are great because they make citation formatting easy for students, I think it is still important for students to know how to properly format citations. When students are learning to format citations free bibliography websites are useful for double checking bibliography format before turning in a paper.