Footnotes and bibliographies are notoriously time consuming to format by hand because of arcane rules that vary from one journal to another. One journal, for example, might require that journal titles in bibliographies be italicized, while another might require that they not be.
That presents a word-processing hassle for professors, especially when a scholar wants to submit a single paper to journals that follow different style rules. It is also a nightmare for undergraduate and graduate students, who wrestle for hours or even days with creating proper citations for term papers and dissertations.
Citation software takes care of that. It creates correctly formatted footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies, frequently using information downloaded from online databases, so the user never has to type in details like the author’s name or the title of the book. (The user still has to enter some information by hand, such as the page of a quotation.) (The Chronicle, free link)
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