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This guide provides models for each of the required forms of resources for your Annotated Bibliography. You will see a breakdown of the different pieces of information you need for the citation using the MLA template and then a couple of examples of what this might look like. It is always important to know what kind of source you are looking at because the format will dictate what the final citation should look like.
"Can't I just use the Cite This feature from Google or wherever I find the publication?"
"Cite This" is a handy feature that is embedded in many websites today, including library databases. While they are an easy place to pull together most of the basic pieces of a citation, they are not always accurate, so you'll want to compare them to a model as well.
"What about citation generators like EasyBib, Citation Machine or Bibme?"
Again, these are a helpful tool that can help with generating a lot of the detail that make citations tricky, but the danger here is "garbage in, garbage out." If you don't enter the information you need correctly, then the generator won't create a correct citation for you. It's always best to have a sense of what the final citation should look like so that you can compare to this.
In summary - definitely use the digital citation tools that are available to help you, but make sure that you have a broader understanding of what good citations should look like. That way you will catch when there are mistakes. Never let a computer think for you!
