8-How to Cite Sources
To write a proper citation we recommend following these steps, which will help you maintain accuracy and clarity in acknowledging sources.
Step 1: Choose Your Citation Style
Find out the name of the citation style you must use from your instructor, the directions for an assignment, or what you know your audience or publisher expects. Then search for your style at the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) or use Google or Bing to find your style’s stylebook/handbook and then purchase it or ask for it at a library. The FSCJ Resources Appendix in the back of this textbook provides links to APA and MLA Style guides and handbooks as well.
Step 2: Create In-Text Citations
Find and read your style’s rules about in-text citations, which are usually very thorough. Luckily, there are usually examples provided that make it a lot easier to learn the rules.
Tip: Style Guides are Usually Very Thorough
For instance, your style guide my have different rules for when you are citing:
- Quotations rather than summaries rather than paraphrases.
- Long, as opposed to short, quotations.
- Sources with one or multiple authors.
- Books, journal articles, interviews and email, or electronic sources.
EXAMPLE: Using a Style Guide to Create an In-Text Citation
Imagine that you’re using APA style and have the APA style guide rules for in-text citations open in Purdue OWL. In your psychogeography paper, you want to quote the authors of the book The Experience of Nature, Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, which was published in 1989. What you want to quote is from page 38 of the book.
Here’s what you want to quote:
“The way space is organized provides information about what one might want to do in that space. A relatively brief glance at a scene communicates whether there is room to roam, whether one’s path is clear or blocked.”
1. Skim the headings in the style guide to remind yourself of what its rules concern.
Since it has rules about the length of quotations, you count the number of words in what you want to quote and find that your quote has 38, which is within the range for short quotations (less than 40), according to the APA style guide. According to the rule for short quotations, you see that you’re supposed to introduce the quote by attributing the quote to the authors (last names only) and adding the publication date in parentheses. You write:
According to Kaplan and Kaplan (1989), “The way space is organized provides information about what one might want to do in that space. A relatively brief glance at a scene communicates whether there is room to roam, whether one’s path is clear or blocked.”
2. Then you notice that the example in the style guide includes the page number on which you found the quotation. It appears at the end of the quote (in parentheses and outside the quote marks but before the period ending the quotation). So you add that:
According to the Kaplan and Kaplan (1989), “The way space is organized provides information about what one