Citations are ways to give credit to individuals for their intellectual and creative works which you have used to support your research. They can also be used to locate particular sources and combat plagiarism.
A citation style is the way the information about a citation is formatted in the references of a research paper or project. Different citation styles dictate the necessary information to include, and how it is ordered and formatted.
The Citing Sources Research Guide from UW is a great introduction to citing sources in the three common formats.
How do I choose a citation style?
There are many ways to format your citations as they are used in your research. The citation style typically depends on the academic discipline of the research paper. The main three used in academia are:
- APA (American Psychological Association) style is used in psychology, education, and other natural and social sciences.
- Chicago style is used among the fine and performing arts, as well as history and business.
- MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used in the humanities, particularly language and literature.
The following sections will provide a more in-depth explanation of each of those three citation styles.
APA
APA style citations are based on the author-date system, which requires that citations appear within the body of a text (“in-text” citations) and in the reference list at the end of your paper. To follow the author-date format in an APA paper, do the following:
- Write the author’s name as it appears in the work and retain the author’s preferred capitalization.
- When indexing the author’s name in a reference list, use only initials: “Smith, J.” rather than “Smith, John,” for example.
- When doing in-text citations, write the author’s last name followed by the publication year. For example, if citing an article by “John Smith” written in 2019, use (Smith, 2019).
When citing multiple works in the same section of a paper in APA style, separate them using a semicolon (;). For example, if you are writing a paper and citing work by authors with the last names “Smith” and “Jones” from two separate years, you may format it like this: (Smith, 2019; Jones, 1998).
APA citations also require the inclusion of each work’s digital object identifier (DOI), a unique identifier for academic papers and journals that enables it to be found on the web. Links to the DOI (formatted as doi.org/xxxxx) can be found on the websites of academic journals where papers are indexed.
Chicago
Chicago style citations are commonly used in the humanities, arts, and business-related disciplines. They come from the Chicago Manual of Style.
For coursework – student papers and projects rather than scholarly or professional publications – the body of papers must be double-spaced, but footnotes and bibliographies must be single-spaced.
Chicago style citations use endnotes, which are placed before the bibliography, or footnotes, placed at the bottom of the page, to cite quotations, paraphrases, and summaries of sources. Footnotes use numbered in-text citations, with a superscript number next to the end of the sentence – each number corresponds to a numbered footnote or endnote that provides author and publication information.
This is how footnotes work in Chicago style:
Jayne Mooney found that “domestic violence has, since the 1970s, been increasingly recognized as a social problem.”1 As Goodman and Epstein point out, resources to assist women in these situations should be focused on “those whose socioeconomic status limits their opportunities to be safe.”2
In the footnotes, each number is attached to a source:
- Jayne Mooney, Gender, Violence, and Social Order (London: Macmillan, 2000), 2.
- Lisa A. Goodman and Deborah Epstein, “A Critical Analysis of System Responses.” Listening to Battered Women: A Survivor-Centered Approach to Advocacy, Mental Health, and Justice (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008), 90.
Subsequent notes are unique to Chicago style, and indicate sources that have already been cited in full, and may be shortened to only include the author’s last name, the work’s title as an abbreviation, and the page. For example, if the Mooney text is cited a second time, a simple subsequent citation would be: Mooney, Gender, Violence, and Social Order, 131-32.
In Chicago citations, every page of the paper must be assigned a page number, including appendices and bibliographies.
MLA
The Modern Language Association identifies eight “core elements” as basic pieces of information that should be common to all source types when included in reference sections or bibliographies:
- Author
- Paper or chapter title: in “quotes”
- Container (book, journal, film, website etc.) title: in italics
- Other contributors (editor, for example)
- Version
- Number
- Publisher
- Publication date (years for books, month and year for non-book sources)
- Location
If a particular core element is not deemed relevant to a particular source type, it can be omitted from the citation – for example, many websites or web articles are not associated with particular versions, and the reference citation will therefore not include a version number.
To perform parenthetical or in-text citations in MLA format, you list the author’s last name, followed by a space and page number, without any extra punctuation (i.e.: no commas like in Chicago). The following is an example of how to cite one author and text in the MLA in-text format:
“Corporal punishment was employed as a legally imposed penalty in Colonial America” (Forer 142).
If you are quoting or citing multiple texts by the same author in the same paper, you would need to separate them by a semicolon.
Need more help with citing?
The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) has a fantastic guide on the mechanics of citation styles and how to cite multiple types of sources.
Text on the UW Libraries web pages are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0), except where otherwise noted. Images and video are not included.