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Citation Guide: How to Cite

This guide will help students understand the different types of citations and how to apply them

Style Guide Overview

What is a style guide? Why & how do we use them? 

Most people know style guides as rules for citation formatting. Common and popular style guides include MLA and APA.  Chicago is also a style learned in academia. 

Style guides are not just for citation. They include a wide range of rules and guidelines for works in their respective fields, from grammar and language use to the font and size of headings in a work. Generally, style manuals include everything a writer needs to know in order to make their work look and read just like every other work written in that style — the look of the page, the way other authors are referenced in the body of the work, and even the tone of the writing. 

Style guides are used as a way of making common elements consistent across documents written by many writers, in many places, and in many circumstances; as a result, readers from any university (or other audience groups) can read a paper written in APA style and know immediately how to navigate the headings of the paper, which details will be listed in the abstract, how quotes will be introduced and marked, where to look for important citation information, and what each citation element represents. 

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What Style Should I Choose?

Now that I know what a style guide is — what's next? 

1. Find out what style you need to be using.

2. Find a copy of the style guide in your library or online and read the manual. 

  • The Chicago Manual of Style's entire first section, almost 200 pages, describes in detail the scholarly process undertaken by researchers using the Chicago style, including expectations for navigating copyright law as an author and for what elements authors need to include in their manuscripts (and how those elements are written). 

  • The MLA Handbook includes a substantial section on how to write a research paper or scholarly work in an MLA field, especially useful for beginning scholars or international scholars writing for an American academic context. 

  • The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association includes sections like those mentioned above in addition to guidelines for writing about research with Indigenous populations, rules for nondiscriminatory language, and more.  Purdue Online Writing Lab

Avoid Plagiarism

When should I cite a source to avoid plagiarizing? 

 Always give credit where credit is due. If the words that you are including in your research belong to someone else, give credit.  

Here is a brief list of what needs to be credited or documented: 

  • Words or ideas presented in a magazine, book, newspaper, song, TV program, movie, website, computer program, letter, advertisement, or any other medium 
  • Information you gain through interviewing or conversing with another person, face to face, over the phone, or in writing 
  • When you copy the exact words or a unique phrase 
  • When you reprint any diagrams, illustrations, charts, pictures, or other visual materials 
  • When you reuse or repost any digital media, including images, audio, video, or other media 

There are certain things that do not need documentation or credit, including: 

  • Writing your own lived experiences, your own observations and insights, your own thoughts, and your own conclusions about a subject 
  • When you are writing up your own results obtained through lab or field experiments 
  • When you use your own artwork, digital photographs, video, audio, etc. 
  • When you are using "common knowledge," things like folklore, common sense observations, myths, urban legends, and historical events (but not historical documents) 
  • When you are using generally accepted facts (e.g., pollution is bad for the environment) including facts that are accepted within particular discourse communities (e.g., in the field of composition studies, "writing is a process" is a generally accepted fact). Purdue Online Writing Lab

Should I Cite This?