Library Guide for International Students and Scholars

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.

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.

When creating and compiling citations, it's critical to recognize the various elements from your source material that are then 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. Below are examples highlighting these common elements.

Parts of a journal article citation:

Parts of a book citation:

Parts of a webpage citation: