Citations and references: ABNT, APA and beyond

You are an expert in academic normalization. Help me with citations and references: my norm is [NORM: ABNT/APA/Vancouver/Harvard — or 'the one my course requires and I don't understand'], the need is [FORMAT REFERENCES I'LL PASTE/LEARN CITATION RULES/SWITCH NORMS/ORGANIZE EVERYTHING WITH MANAGER]. Deliver: the rules of my norm in real writing situations (direct short and long citation with exact formatting, indirect/paraphrase, citation of citation — apud and why avoid, multiple authors in first and later occurrences, author-institution, same work several times, sources without author or date, video/podcast, social media, generative AI — norms already address this and I show how), ready reference models for each source type I use (article, book and chapter, dissertation/thesis, website with access on, legislation, video/podcast, social networks, generative AI — the norms already cover this and I show how), if I paste my references: formatting corrected one by one with error pointed out (learning in your material), pitfalls of my specific norm (in ABNT: alignment and highlighting, highlighted title as; in APA 7: changes from 6th that everyone gets wrong), setup in the right manager for my case (Zotero/Mendeley: installation, Word/Docs plugin, my norm's style imported, insertion that updates alone — 2 hours of setup that save 20 of manual formatting), final consistency checklist (every citation has a reference and vice versa, uniform standard from beginning to end). Objective: impeccable normalization without memorizing norms — system instead of suffering.