Legal Bibliography Management and Student Writing Programs
Don Zhou, William Mitchell College of Law

There are many citation computer programs used in academia, but when Zhou began working in a law library, he noticed immediately that no one in legal scholarship or education was using them. He decided to develop a system for law students to find, organize, and retrieve documents for legal research.

He decided to use CiteIT for a writing project in one of his class. It allows him to quickly and easily enter any kind of legal resource into his computer. In addition to saving the citation, the program will take a snapshot of the website containing the resource (e.g., a statute published online). The program also automatically preserves the URL for the web page so you can easily return to the page to view its updated content.

When entering a citation from a webpage, CiteIT can import the citation directly from your web browser. All you need to do is highlight the citation in the web page, and CiteIT does the rest.

CiteIT also provides space for adding your own notes to each resource.

By adding all cases, statutes, etc. to CiteIT, the full text of your complete research is now contained in one location. The program allows you to organize your documents by keyword to make it easier to find relevant material quickly. For creating hard copies of your research, you can pick and choose which pieces (full-text, citations, notes, etc.) you want in your printout.

Then, as you write your paper, CiteIT will automatically insert correct citations into your word processor and create a table of authorities.

In addition, Zhou notes that another useful program for citation purposes is LexisNexis Shepard's StyleCheck, which makes sure all your citations are in proper format.