Citation

Citation Video Transcript

Citation: Working with Style Guides

I am Alison Peer, Assistant Director of Student Conduct and Civility Education at Towson University

Using citations to correctly attribute the source material you’ve used in an academic project is essential to avoid plagiarism. Citations allow you to document your sources and give credit to those creators and authors whose work you’ve used in your project or paper. They also allow your instructor, or anyone else who reads your paper, to track down those same sources for themselves.

Hi, I am Conor Reynolds.

Citation styles vary by discipline. The Modern Language Association Style Manual (or MLA), the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (or APA), and The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago) are the three most common style guides used in college and university courses.

Each style guide has a standard format for the citations included in the main body of your paper—which are also known as “in-text” or “parenthetical” citations—and those citations provided in the bibliography at the end of your paper.

Identifying which type of information source you’ve used can be one of the hardest steps in citing your sources properly.

Is the source a journal article, a chapter from an e-book, a blog post, a paper or presentation that was delivered at a conference, or something else?

This can be very hard to determine, especially when you’ve conducted research online, where different types of information sources can look very similar.

Consult with your instructor or with a librarian if you aren’t sure what specific type of source you’re citing.

Once you’ve determined the type of source, you can refer to the style guide for the proper format for a citation for that type of source.

First we’ll discuss in-text (or parenthetical) citations, those that appear within the main body of your paper.

You should cite a source in the main body of your paper every time that you mention it or quote from it. So a single source can and should be cited multiple times if you have referred to it in different parts of your paper.

The way that you’ll cite sources within your paper will differ, depending on which style guide you’re using.

For example, in MLA style, you would include the last name of the author or authors, along with the number of the page that contains the information you’re referring to.

If you have already mentioned the author’s name in your text, MLA style says that you just include the page number.

Note that in both cases, the period comes after the closing parenthesis for the in-text citation.

If your text includes a direct quote from your source, in MLA style you would include, in parentheses at the end of your sentence, the page number where the quoted words appear in the source, followed by a period.

At the end of your paper, regardless of which style guide you use, you will include a list of all of the sources that you cited in the main body of your paper.

This list of sources is called different things in each style guide: Works Cited, Bibliography, or References.

For the sake of simplicity, in this tutorial we will call the list of sources that appears at the end of your paper the bibliography.

The bibliography should only contain those sources that you’ve actually used in some way in your paper or project. It does not include sources you consulted but which you did not refer to, either by way of paraphrase or direct quotation.

Unlike in-text citations, where a single source can be cited several times, in a bibliography each source is listed only once. And in most style guides the citations are arranged alphabetically.

The bibliography allows your readers to see at one glance all of the sources that you’ve used in your paper.

It also allows your reader to flip easily from your in-text citation of a source to the full publication info for that source, allowing the reader to locate a copy of that source.

As with in-text citations, bibliographic citations will look different according to the style guide you’re using. But despite these differences, the same basic elements are always provided.

Let’s see how a complete citation in a bibliography would look for the same source in each of the three major style guides.

In MLA style, the citation for a book would appear as follows…

In Chicago style, the citation looks almost exactly the same…

In APA style, we see some significant differences in the way the citation is formatted.

The same elements appear in all three citations…

The author name or names…

The title of the book…

The place of publication…

The name of the publisher…

And the date of publication.

But the form and punctuation of these elements, and the order in which they appear, will differ from one style to another.

You’ll want to check the guide for the style you’re using for specific rules.

A citation for a journal article will look different than the book citations we just reviewed.

And even though citations for journal articles will look different from one style to another, the same basic elements will be included. For instance:

Here is an MLA style citation for a journal article…

… a Chicago style citation for a journal article…

….and an APA style citation for a journal article

The elements provided in all three of these citations include:

The authors’ names…

the title of the article…

the title of the journal…

the journal’s volume and issue number…

the date of the issue that includes the article…

and the page numbers where the article appears.

Depending on the style guide, the citation for a journal article found in an online database might also include the following additional elements:

A DOI, or digital object identifier, for the article…

the name of the database in which the article was found…

and the date you accessed the article in that database.

Citations can be tricky, so remember: consult your style guide as needed when constructing your citations.

And since your professor is the final authority on grading your citations, if he or she has provided any specific rules or suggestions, you should follow those as well.

Academic Ethics

Towson University

Citation Video Transcript