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Research Guides

Citing Sources

This guide offers resources to help you document the sources you're citing in your research papers and projects.

What style are you using?

MLA 9th Chicago & Turabian APA 7th

ACS CSE ASA

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Why Citing is Important

Citing or documenting the sources used in your research serves three purposes.

  1. It gives proper credit to the authors of the words or ideas that you incorporated into your paper.
  2. It allows those who are reading your work to locate your sources, in order to learn more about the ideas that you include in your paper.
  3. Citing your sources consistently and accurately helps you avoid committing plagiarism in your writing.
It can be tempting to simply make a list of links to online sources you used to write your paper or prepare your project. However, only providing the URL doesn't give your reader enough information to find the source you used, especially when the link stops working.

A good citation makes it easy for the reader to figure out the who, what, when, and where of the source. In MLA style, a citation also often indicates how it was accessed.

diagram of MLA citation

Identifying Parts of a Citation

This section illustrates how to interpret the parts of a citation for different types of sources using examples in MLA format. Being able to interpret a citation is important when you have one in hand (for example, from the bibliography of a journal article, from a website, or from a professor) and want to track down the original source. Although citations look different in other styles such as APA and Turabian, the same information is generally present, but with a different order and formatting.

 

Identifying the key parts of a citation will help you know how to search for the source. For example:

  • If the item is a book or book chapter, you should search the title of the book or chapter in Library Catalog or WorldCat.
  • If the item is a journal article, you should search the journal's title in the Journal Finder and use the volume, issue, or year of publication to browse to the desired article.

General Format for any Type of Source

Author. Title. Title of container (self contained if book), Other contributors (translators or editors), Version (edition), Number

          (vol. and/or no.), Publisher, Publication Date, Location (pages, paragraphs URL or DOI). 2nd container’s title, Other

          contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location, Date of Access (if applicable).

Books

MLA book citation example

Book Chapters

If the entire book was written by the same author(s), including the chapter being cited, there will be no book editor(s) listed in the citation.

Journal Articles

If the article is available online in a research database, you will often see the database's name and the date of retrieval in the citation, as in the example below. If the article was obtained from a print copy of a magazine or journal, the citation will end with the page numbers.

Web Sources

If the web document has no author or publication date, its citation will not include this information. The "publisher" refers to the organization, company, or other entity on whose website the article or page resides. If the Publisher is the same as the author (e.g. corporate or government author), list it only once.

Identifying the Type of a Source by Its Citation

This section will help you distinguish among the major kinds of sources that you will encounter in the library's research resources. It provides tips on what to look for to determine whether an item is a book, book chapter, or journal article. Once you decide what type of source you have, you will know what information you need in order to cite it properly in your paper or presentation.

 

Is it a book?

Look for:

  • a single title
  • publisher information
  • no page numbers

 

A book in the Geisel Library catalog:

 

A book in an EBSCO database:

Is it a book chapter?

Look for:

  • both a chapter title and a book title
  • publisher information
  • page numbers

 

A book chapter in an EBSCO database:

Is it a journal article?

Look for:

  • both an article title and a journal title
  • a volume number
  • page numbers

 

A journal article in an EBSCO database: