The citations and bibliography in any scholarly work have two purposes:
To do that, your citations and bibliography need to include complete and accurate information about your sources, arranged in a consistent way that does not confuse your reader. At this point in your research, you will all have encountered unhelpful footnotes with mysterious abbreviations, incorrect information, or other problems.
There are many ways to arrange the information. This is called "style" and there are several common styles in use. Commonly used styles in academic writing include The Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, and APA.
An overview and summary of each style is found at Purdue OWL Research and Citation Resources
The full set of rules for each style is found in these publications:
Bibliographic management tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote enable you to store library sources in your own personal database and then incorporate the citations seamlessly into your research paper in whatever format your writing seminar requires. Within these tools you can take also notes on the books and articles you find and search those notes by keyword.
Go to the bibliographic management LibGuide to learn more.