Generally, you’ll have full citations listed at the end of your paper. The citation list may be called a reference list, bibliography, or Works Cited, depending on the type of citation style you’re using. Within the body of your paper, use in-text citations to signal that the material preceding the citation is not your original work. The in-text citation allows your reader to find the full citation at the end of your paper. In-text citations may use the in-line parenthetical, footnote, or endnote style.
For a print source, find the publication information on the back of the title page. Look for the copyright information. In print magazines and journals, this information typically appears on the same page as the table of contents, or on the page that lists the periodical’s staff. For articles online, use the date that appears on the article itself – not the copyright date for the website. To identify the publisher of the website, look for an “about” page. You may also be able to find this information at the bottom of the homepage. If you’re citing an article that appears in a magazine or journal, write down the pages on which the article appears.
If you accessed a scholarly article from an online database, it may have a digital object identifier (DOI). Use this number instead of a URL.
If you include the author’s name in your text, put the year in parentheses immediately after their name. For example: Allison (1987) demonstrated that leaving the ground in sod increases the organic matter of the soil by 15 percent in 10 years. If you’re quoting the source directly, include the page number in your in-text parenthetical citation. For example: Allison (1987) asserted that “leaving the ground in sod increases the organic matter of the soil by 15 percent in 10 years” (p. 45).
Generally, you’ll separate the elements of the citation with commas rather than periods. Publication information typically is set off in parentheses. The only period in a Chicago-style footnote occurs at the very end. For example: Kent Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
If the source you’re citing doesn’t have an author, use a shortened version of the title instead. Use enough of the title that your reader could easily find the full reference entry in your Works Cited. Put the title in quotation marks. For example, if you were creating a parenthetical citation for a source called “Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously,” and it didn’t have an author, you might use: (“Sustainable Cities” 57).
The most common format for author’s names is to place the last name first, followed by a comma, then the first name. Typically you will close this portion of the reference entry with a period. For example: Hawking, Stephen. For some citation styles, such as APA style, only include the author’s first initial in your reference entry, rather than their full first name. For example: Hawking, S. W. If you’re citing a work with three or more authors in MLA or APA, or one with more than 10 authors in Chicago style, you’ll need to cite with cite with “et al. " instead of listing all authors.
For example: Hawking, S. W. (1998). For some sources, such as magazines and newspapers, you need a more specific date. Type the year first, followed by a comma. Then type the month and day the article was published. For example: Hawking, S. W. (2005, July).
Journal article example: Hawking, Stephen. “Information Loss in Black Holes. " Physical Review, July 2005. Most citation styles require titles in title-case, meaning that all nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs are capitalized. For example: Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. APA style uses sentence-case for titles, capitalizing only the first word and any proper pronouns. For example: Hawking, S. W. (1998). A brief history of time.
APA example: Hawking, S. W. (1998). A brief history of time. New York: Bantam. For print sources, most styles call for the city and state where the source was published (or city and country, for sources published outside the U. S. ) to be listed first. The location is typically followed by a colon, after which the name of the publisher is listed. For example: Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1998. For most citation styles, the year the source was published follows the name of the publisher. Typically only the year is needed, although for periodical publications, such as newspapers or magazines, you may need a more specific date. The year of publication typically is the copyright year. However, for online sources, look for a date the specific article was published rather than using the copyright year of the website as a whole.
Many scholarly articles are available through online databases. If you accessed an article through one of these databases, you’ll typically provide the article’s unique digital object identification (DOI) number, rather than a URL. For some citation styles, you must also include the name of the database in your reference entry.
