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Citing sources is an academic convention for keeping track of which sources influenced your own thinking and research. (See Ethical Use of Sources for many good reasons why you should cite others’ work.)
Most citations require two parts:
- The full bibliographic citation on the Bibliography page or References page, or Works Cited page of your final product.
- An indication within your text (usually author and publication date and maybe the page number from which you are quoting) that tells your reader where you have used something that needs a citation.
With your in-text citation, your reader will be able to tell which full bibliographic citation you are referring to by paying attention to the author’s name and publication date.
Let’s look at an example.
Example: Citations in Academic Writing
Here’s a citation in the text of an academic paper:
Studies have shown that compared to passive learning, which occurs when students observe a lecture, students will learn more and will retain that learning longer if more active methods of teaching and learning are used (Bonwell and Eison 1991; Fink 2003).
The information in parentheses coordinates with a list of full citations at the end of the paper.
At the end of the paper, these bibliographic entries appear in a reference list:
Bonwell, C. G., and Eison, J. A. 1991. “Active learning: Creating excitement in the classroom.” ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Rep. No. 1, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.
Fink, L. D. 2003. Creating significant learning experiences, Wiley, New York.
Citation Styles
Style guides set the specific rules for how to create both in-text citations and their full bibliographic citations.
There are over a dozen kinds of citation styles. While each style requires much of the same publication information to be included in a citation, the styles differ from each other in formatting details such as capitalization, punctuation, order of publication information, and whether the author’s name is given in full or abbreviated.
Example: Differences in Citation Styles
The image below shows bibliographic citations in four common styles. Notice that they contain information about who the author is, article title, journal title, publication year, and information about volume, issue, and pages. Notice also the small differences in punctuation, order of the elements, and formatting that do make a difference.
Compare citation elements (including the punctuation and spacing) in the same color to see how each style handles their information.
