Understanding Citations
- Describe a book, journal article, website, or other published item
- Give credit to the originator of an idea, thus preventing plagiarism
- Enable the reader to retrieve the item you refer to
Why Cite?
It's important to cite in order to:
- Give credit to ideas that are not your own
- Provide support for your argument (professor's love that!)
- Enable your reader to find and read the sources you used, which makes your research process transparent
- Avoid Honor Code infractions and/or plagiarism
Examples of citations include:
- Exact wording taken from any source, including freely available websites
- Paraphrases of passages
- Indebtedness to another person for an idea
- Use of another student's work
- Use of your own previous work
You DO NOT need to cite common knowledge.
In an annotated bibliography, each citation is followed by a brief note—or annotation—that describes and/or evaluates the source and the information found in it.
Citation and Writing Support
There are a variety of different ways to cite resources in your paper. The citation style usually depends on the academic discipline involved. For example:
- MLA style is typically used by the Humanities
- APA style is often used by Education, Psychology, and Business.
- Chicago/Turabian is generally used by History and some of the Fine Arts
- Chicago Author-Date is used by Archeologists
Check with your professor to make sure you use the required style. Whatever style you use, be consistent! View our Writing and Citation Support Guide for more helpful tips.
- Citation Styles guideRefer to this guide for details on MLA, APA, Chicago citation styles and more.
A great one-stop shop resource is the Purdue OWL, which has easy-to-follow examples of the major style guides. You can also peruse formatting manuals at the Library:
Formatting and Styles
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) by Call Number: BF76.7 .P83 2020; Ref. BF76.7 .P83 2020ISBN: 9781433832161Publication Date: 2019-10-01
- Purdue OWL: APA Formatting and StyleA great resource that offers examples of the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page.
- Purdue OWL: MLA Formatting and StyleA great resource that offers examples of the general format of MLA research papers, including in-text citations and the works cited page.
- Purdue OWL: Chicago Manual of StyleThis excellent resource helps students learn the Chicago Manual of Style method of document formatting and citation.
Citation Management
A common problem of students writing research papers is that they have lots of books, websites, and PDFs of articles with no real way to keep track of all these source materials in one place. Citation management systems (CMSes) are designed to help you keep track of citations and PDFs. They allow you to download citations from databases and websites, and to store, organize, and format those citations.
These are particularly helpful for:
- large research projects with many sources
- ongoing research into an area of interest
- any research where you want to save sources that you can reference in the future
A good, free CMS is Zotero. If you have any questions about using this software, please ask a librarian.
Need Extra Help?
For additional assistance, schedule an appointment with the Tutoring and Writing Consulting Center or a research consultation with any Olin librarian.