These editable templates are a great tool for getting started, but they are not always perfect and may be slightly out of date, so use your critical thinking skills to double check for correctness before submitting.
Citing is an important part of academic writing, content creation, and daily communications. We cite in order to:
Whenever you use someone else's work or ideas.
In general, there are three ways to incorporate information from your sources into your research project:
Each time you have incorporated information from your sources into your paper, you need to cite the source in the following two places:
The style guide will tell you exactly how to format each of these parts of citing, but the idea is the same across all of the styles.
APA and MLA are two of the most common style guides for academic writing and publishing, but there are MANY others (Style Guides). We also have styles for every day citing -- think of the 'PC:@" or "camera emoji:@" in Instagram to give photo credit or think of an online article that links to other articles. These are not the formal academic citing styles from a published style guide like MLA & APA, but they do follow an accepted social guideline for how to correctly give credit to the original creator.
Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has two different documentation systems. The Notes-Bibliography system is preferred in literature, history, and the arts disciplines. The Author-Date system is primarily used by the social sciences. Not sure which system you should use for your assignment? Ask your professor.
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations by Kate L. Turabian is a helpful resource geared towards students. The Chicago Manual of Style is written for scholars who are planning to publish their work.
This guide is meant as a general overview. For more in-depth help, please use the following resources or contact an LPC librarian.