What is a Citation?
A citation
- describes a book, journal article, website, or other published item;
- gives credit to the originator of an idea, thus preventing plagiarism;
- enables the reader to retrieve the item you refer to;
- includes the author, title, source (publisher and place of publication or URL), and date.
Why Cite?
Why should you cite your sources?
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To give credit to ideas that are not your own
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To provide support for your argument (professor's love that!)
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To enable your reader to find and read the sources you used -- this makes your research process transparent
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To avoid Honor Code infractions and/or plagiarism!
What should you cite?
- 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
Note: You DO NOT need to cite common knowledge.
Citation Guides
There are quite a few 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
Check with your professor to make sure you use the required style. Whatever style you use, be consistent!
A great one-stop shopping resource is THE PURDUE OWL. This has easy-to-follow examples of the major style guides.
The Chicago Manual of Style Online
Citation Tools
The Olin Library does not endorse or support any particular one of these, but we will assist you in configuring your chosen citation tool to work with our resources.
Zotero: A plug-in for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari; also available as a stand-alone Windows application. Free, with additional storage available for purchase.
Mendeley: A desktop and web program that stores document PDFs. Free, with additional storage and premium features available for purchase. Mendeley is particularly strong working with articles in the sciences.
EndNote: EndNote is the most elaborate and well-established citation management tool, with many advanced features. It must be purchased, and has a steeper learning curve than the other tools listed here.
Other citation formatting tools merely help you word your citations in the appropriate format (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). These tools are useful when you won’t need to return to your list of sources after completing an immediate project.
Citation Machine: Free web tool for MLA and APA style citations.
EasyBib: Free MLA citation formatting, with APA and Chicago/Turabian formatting for a paid subscription.
NoodleBib: Part of Noodletools, a suite of tools for note-taking, outlining, and other writing tasks. Noodle tools requires a paid subscription, but has limited functionality with a free “MLAlite” account.
Your Librarian
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