Citation Help

Citing -- documenting and attributing your sources -- is important for your scholarly credibility. You may have a good idea, but simply stating it does not make it true or believable. When you build on previous research by citing, you give your ideas validity and demonstrate how those ideas connect to other authors' or artists' works. Additionally, citations help the next researcher understand the steps you took in your research process, and allows them to find sources for their research.

Finally, avoiding plagiarism is key to academic honesty. Claiming someone's original work as your own is fraud. Citations give authors their due credit.

Citation is widely used as a metric for evaluating performance in Western academia. Like other cultural practices, citation is susceptible to biases that reflect and reinforce dominant historical power structures of race, gender, and class.

Citation justice is the practice of maintaining an awareness of these biases and actively working to build more inclusive and equitable citation networks within your works. By choosing to cite scholars with varied backgrounds and identities, you intentionally expand the academic conversation, and increase equity and inclusion in your fields.

Some suggestions for inclusive citation practice include:

• Experiment with search terms and sources, and broaden your reading: reading from a range of cultures, races, and other identities can help diversify citations. 
• Audit your citation list. Does it include racialized, female-identified, early-career, or non-academic authors?
• Include a citation diversity statement to increase the transparency of your practice and encourage other scholars to do likewise.

Interested in learning more about citation justice?

• University of Minnesota's guide to conducting anti-racist research
• Michigan State University's guide to AI and citation equality
• Kwon (2022). The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer. Nature 603(7902): 568-571. doi: 10.1038/d41586-022-00793-1
• Mott and Cockayne (2017). Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement.’  Gender, place and culture 24(7): 954-973. doi: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339022

Good writing is expected of students at the University of Michigan. Writing helps you make your points, clarify and extend your research with evidence, and demonstrate your understanding of a topic. Because most academic disciplines have different writing conventions and styles, we recommend that you refer to handbooks, usage and style guides, manuals, grammars, etc. found in our collections. On campus writing support is available, too.

• Sweetland Writing Support: Sweetland Writing Center provides peer tutoring in a variety of locations across campus. Set up an appointment to go over your paper with a peer tutor.
• Sweetland Undergraduate Writing Guides: Short guides from the Sweetland Writing Center on incorporating quotes, making a stronger analysis, deciding what to argue, and more.

Some other helpful sources include:

• The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University -- has instructions and examples on APA and MLA citation styles. 
• The Excelsior College Online Writing Lab -- provides extensive information on the writing process, evaluating research, and tutorials on building citations in APA, MLA, and Chicago style(s).
• The American Psychological Association -- has a great website of style examples and grammar guidelines. See the References section for basic principles of reference lists, examples of references, DOIs, and more.  
• The Modern Language Association's MLA Style Center -- provides advice and citation examples.
• The Chicago Manual of Style quick citation guide -- for authoritative examples of Chicago style of notes and bibliography.