Citations Learn It 2

Citations with Google Docs

Citations are what give credit to sources. Sources should receive credit for contributing to your report, but citations are also vital to avoid plagiarism. Citations appear in many different kinds of documents, from educational papers to business plans. Google’s Explore command is an automated feature that is used in conjunction with citations. Word has a similar command called Smart Lookup, but it only allows you to search the internet, not get autogenerated citations.

Assume that you have a list of web pages that you used as the bibliography. Without automation, you would need to manually type in the website title, address, and date for each source you are citing, whether it is in a simple list at the bottom of the report, or as a footnote, or even in a separate document. With automation—that is, the Explore command—this task could become much less time-consuming.

As you are writing a report, you can cite the source, and have Docs do the formatting of the reference. You can cite the source either as a footnote or in the body of the text itself. Citing with footnotes is made easy with Docs. Just select a sentence or word and go to the Explore icon at the bottom of the page.

An Explore button is shown in the bottom of a computer screen.
The Explore button is a gateway to formatting references. 

A sidebar will appear, where you can once again search for the source in a Google Search. When you have found the referenced site again, just use the Google Search feature of citation formatting.

An Explore pane is open. The search bar lists: Sources: Laptops - United States. Below are three tabs – Web, Images, and Drive. The Web results list below.
The right side of the figure shows the references for the highlighted information. (Google Docs is a trademark of Google LLC.)

Then, click on Cite as footnote on the Google Search Explore sidebar.

An Explore pane is open with Sources: Laptops-United States in the search. In the top right corner of the first Web result a quotation mark is labeled Cite as footnote.
f you have a document that needs multiple sources formatted, the cite as footnote will be a handy tool. 

The Explore tool automatically adds the citation on a footnote, using the citing format of the manual of style of your choice.

A citation is shown at the bottom left of a document under a line and indicated with a small “1” that matches the information in the text of the document.
Using the Explore tool lets you add citations rapidly.