A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization, or field. A style guide provides uniformity in style and formatting within a document and across multiple documents. Your professor will tell you which citation style to use for your classwork.
The Middlebury Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research (CTLR) Writing Center is also an excellent resource for citation assistance.
Citation managers are great tools for keeping your research organized. You can use them to keep track of references you want to cite in your paper, share resources with your peers, and automatically generate citations for you. These tools can streamline your research process and save you a lot of time. However, make sure you double check any automatically generated citations for accuracy.
Scientific publishing has its own expectations for writing style. Clear and accurate writing in science helps improve reproducibility of methods. Remember to consult your professor for writing requirements for your class. Here are a few additional resources to help you start.
Eloquent Science by 
