Citing Your Sources
When I ask students why we cite sources, they usually tell me two things: so that we don’t get accused of plagiarism and so that we give credit to other people for their work. While the former is true, the latter is much more important.
People who are honest about their intellectual work want to get credit for that work, and they want to give credit to those who have helped shape their ideas. If you write something that makes a difference and is worth quoting, wouldn’t you want to get credit?
In addition, we cite so that others can find our sources. Frequently, as I am reading someone else’s research, I see a source that I want to understand better. The citations help me locate that source for my own use.
The desire to give credit means that we need to acknowledge our sources. The desire to help others locate our sources means that we need to follow style guides. Those guides provide conventions for citing, and if we follow those guides, readers familiar with those conventions should have no trouble locating the sources.
Citation is one of the few places in academic writing where the ideas “right” and “wrong” apply. There are rules, and you should follow them to the best of your ability.
In this section, I’m not going to provide a guide for using any specific style. You can find those guides in lots of places, including on the internet. Instead, I’m going to explain how citation works so that you can apply these principles to your projects.
Understanding Citation Styles
There are many citation styles, usually specific to different disciplines. For example, disciplines like psychology and education use the American Psychological Association (APA) style, while literature uses the Modern Language Association (MLA) style and biology uses the Council of Science Editors (CSE) style. Some disciplines use more than one. Business, for example, might use APA, the Chicago Manual of Style (usually just called “Chicago”), or Harvard Business School style (usually just called “Harvard”). You can find a number of guides for choosing styles online, like this one from the American University Library.
You won’t need to learn all of these, even when you are taking classes in those fields. You should plan to learn the primary style (or styles) for your discipline, but for specific classes, your professor can tell you which style you should use. And many professors of general education courses will just tell you that you need to follow a style guide, but they are indifferent about which one.
There are so many different styles in part because different disciplines have need for different information about sources. For example, many styles include the year of publication of the source in the in-text citation, but MLA doesn’t. That’s because for the disciplines that use MLA, the date of the research is not terribly important. As another example, many sources in the sciences use a note numbering system and highly abbreviated reference list entries bec