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All About College Research

From annotated bibliographies, to doing the research, to citing source, this guide goes through all the major steps in a writing a research paper.

How to Cite Your Sources, Everything you need to know about citations

All About Citing Sources

Citations perform very important roles in research, both at an academic and a professional level.

  • They tell your readers where you located your information.
  • They tell your professors what kind of research you performed.
  • They connect your research to the work of other researchers and scholars.
  • They give you authority as a writer and researcher.

Why Should I Cite?

Citing your sources

  • provides credit to the original authors,
  • prevents plagiarism, and
  • meets requirements of assignments.

When Should I Cite?

You should use citations whenever you quote, paraphrase, or summarize someone else's work.

  • Quotations are exact duplicates of other people's words.
  • Paraphrases are other people's ideas rewritten in your own words. They're usually about the same length as the original material.
  • Summaries are other people's ideas that you've shortened to highlight the main ideas. They're always shorter than the original material.

You should cite your sources whenever you write ideas that aren't your original ideas. For specific situations, take a look at our Plagiarism page.

"I've heard some people say citation, and other people say reference. What's the difference?"

Citations and references are linked to each other. When you cite a source, you're providing credit for that source in two different places: a citation and a reference.

  • The citation is placed within the text where you refer to the source. It's also called an "in-text citation" for this reason. This is a short version of information about the source. It could be a parenthetical citation: (Bradbury, 1970). Or, it could be an endnote or a footnote: 2.
  • The reference is placed in the list at the end of your paper. This is the longer version of information about the source, and it looks something like this:
    Bradbury, R. (1970). Fahrenheit 451. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

The citation should always match the reference. That way, if a reader wants to find more information about a source while reading your work, they can just flip to the back to locate the source in your reference list according to the information you provided in your citation.

It's also a good idea to double-check that all of the sources in the in-text citations are in the reference list, and vice versa. In other words, don't include sources in your reference list that you didn't quote or paraphrase; that's called "bib padding."

Different subjects and disciplines tend to favor specific style guides.

  • APA Style: social sciences, including psychology, sociology, and business, and some sciences
  • MLA Style: humanities, English, literature
  • Chicago Style: history, humanities

IMPORTANT NOTE: Check your syllabus and assignment instructions to see if your professor requires a particular citation style. As you can see, some subjects can use more than one type of style, and your professors' preferences will always be a higher priority that these general disciplinary categories. Professors will usually specify the style they prefer, and you can always clarify with them as well.

When using a library resource, chances are a citation for the item will already be available. Just find the button for "cite" or "citation", and you've got it! Here are a few examples of how that may look.

Gale will have this row of buttons in the upper right hand side of the screen.

Bar of buttons from Gale - Cite, Send to, Download, Print, Get List, and Highlights and Notes (0)

 

 

EBSCO will have this row of buttons along the right hand side of the screen.

Banner reading: Tools - Google Drive, OneDrive, Add to folder, Print, E-mail, Save, Cite, Export, Create Note, Peralink, Listen, Translate

JSTOR will have this row of buttons in the upper right hand side of the screen.

Row of buttons that read: Cite, Share, Save, Download

Once you've found the "cite" button, simply find the style your professor requested and copy and paste that into your citations page. In the event that the resource you're using does not have one of these tools, there are citation generators listed in the resources pages of all the citation style guides!

Putting the Pieces Together

While there are different citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.), they all serve the same purpose and have similar fill-in-the-blank properties. Think of them like jigsaw puzzles. You just have to put the pieces together. And just as different jigsaw puzzles are completed in different ways, different citations have different orders of placement.

book citation jigsaw puzzle
citation jigsaw puzzle solved

book citation jigsaw scatter

citation jigsaw puzzle pile

Note also that syntax and punctuation matter in the creation of citations. If you place the citation elements in the wrong order with incorrect punctuation, the citation won't work — just as the jigsaw pieces wouldn't fit together if the shapes or edges weren't exact matches.

All references provide the same types of information:

  • Who - Who's responsible for writing the source? Author, editor, translator.
  • When - When was the source published or produced? Date. Sometimes just year; sometimes month and year; sometimes day, month, and year.
  • What - What's the name of the source? Book, article, or journal title; series title; subtitle; etc.
  • Where - Who produced the source and where are they located? Publisher, publisher location, website URL or DOI, etc. Is the source from a specific location? Book chapter, edition, journal volume and issue number, etc.
  • Some citation and reference styles want to know the source's format, such as print or web, as well as when you accessed the material.

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