Why Cite?
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 Style Guides
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Citation HelpProvides an overview of how to cite your sources in MLA and APA citation styles, and a few other popular styles.
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Purdue OWLHighly recommended grammar and citation resource.
Tools for Formatting Citations
Having trouble formatting your citations? Use these tools to automatically generate citations for books, journal articles, newspapers and more in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles.
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KnightCite @ Calvin CollegeKnightCite is an online citation generator service provided by the Hekman Library of Calvin College.
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University of North Carolina Citation BuilderThis citation generator will format citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, or CSE citation styles.
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EasyBibEasyBib is an automatic bibliography and citation generator for MLA citations.
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Additional Citation ToolsProvides guidance on how to use choose a citation management program and how-to use various citation management programs.
Parts of a Citation
When creating and compiling citations, it's critical to recognize the various elements required in a citation. While each citation style requires different formatting, and likely a different order of various parts, there are common elements used to describe a source in any citation style: author name(s), item title, publication date, and name of the publication or source. Other elements might be version or edition, number, page numbers, location (including online location), format, and date accessed.
Parts of a citation for a book:
Accessible Text Equivalent to "Parts of Citations" Image
Parts of a citation for a book:
Author: Joyce, James.
Title of Book: Finnegans Wake
Place of Publication: New York
Publisher: Viking
Date of Publication: 1959.
Parts of a citation for a journal article:
Author: Malakoff, David.
Title of Article: Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses.
Title of Journal: Science.
Issue: 295
Volume: 5564
Page Number: 2359
Date: 2002 Mar 29
Parts of a citations for sources found on the web:
Author: Sargent, Judy.
Title of Web Page: Anorexia Nervosa: Judy's Story.
Date Viewed: Retrieved May 24, 2002
URL: http://www.angelfire.com/ms/anorexianervosa/