43 Steps for Citing

EXAMPLE: Style Guides Are Usually Very Thorough

For instance, your style guide may 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: Bibliographic Citation Rules Are Very Specific

• Rules vary for sources, depending, for instance, on whether they are books, journal articles, or online sources.
• Sometimes lines of the citation must be indented.
• Authors’ names usually appear last name first.
• Authors’ first names may be initials instead.
• Names of sources may or may not have to be in full.
• Names of some kinds of sources may have to be italicized.
• Names of some sources may have to be in quotes.
• Dates of publication appear in different places, depending on the style.
• Some styles require Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the citations for online sources.

EXAMPLE: Using a Style Guide to Create a Bibliographic Citation

Imagine that you’re using MLA style and have the MLA style guide rules for bibliographic citations open in OWL. Your citation will be for the book called The Experience of Nature, written by Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan and published in 1989.

1. You start by trying to apply OWL’s basic rules of MLA style, which tell you your citation will start with the last name of the first author followed by his or her first name, and that the second line of the citation will be indented. So you write: Kaplan, Rachel and Kaplan, Stephen and remind yourself to indent the second line when you get there.
2. Since you have two authors, you look for a rule regarding that situation, which requires a comma between the authors and the word “and” between the names. You also need to write the second author’s name starting with their first name followed by their last name So you write: Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan.
3. Because you know your source is a book, you look for style guide rules and examples about books. For instance, the rules for MLA style say that the title is listed in italics followed by a period after the last author’s name. You apply the rules and examples and write the publication information you know about your source: Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature.
4. Next, you look at the rules and examples of book citations and notice that they show the publisher information. So, you find that information about your source (in a book, usually on the title page or its back) and write: Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature. Cambridge University Press.
5. Finally, looking at the style guide, you see that you need to include a comma after the publisher followed by the date of publication, and end the citation with a period. You look for the date of publication for your source (for a book, it is usually on the same page as the publisher information) and write: Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

When you put it all together, your citation looks like this:

Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature. Cambridge
University Press, 1989.

Congratulations, especially about remembering to indent that line! You have created the first bibliographic citation for your final product.

EXAMPLE: Using a Style Guide to Create an In-Text Citation

Imagine that you’re using MLA style and have the MLA style guide rules for in-text citations open in OWL. In your biology paper, you want to quote the authors of the book The Experience of Nature by 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 typed lines for what you want to quote and find that your quote is 2.5 lines long, which is within the range for short quotations (4 typed lines or fewer of prose, or 3 lines of verse), according to the MLA style guide. According to the rule for short quotations, you see that you need to enclose the quote in double quotation marks (“text you are quoting”). You write:

“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. You also notice that the style guide instructs you to include the name of the author, either in the text before the quote, or after the quote in parentheses. 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:

According to the Kaplans, “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” (38).

3. You’re feeling pretty good, but then you realize that you have overlooked the rule about having multiple authors. You have two and their last names are both Kaplan. Again, the author names can either be listed in the text, or in parentheses after the end of the quote. So you change your sentence to:

According to Kaplan and Kaplan, “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” (38).

So you have your first in-text citation for your final product:

According to Kaplan and Kaplan, “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” (38).

The alternate way of doing an in-text citation for this quote would be:

“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” (Kaplan and Kaplan 38).

Remember, for any information you have cited in-text, you must have a corresponding full citation on your Works Cited page.

TIP: Citation Software

If you like, you can use citation generator software to arrange the information needed for your citation according to the style guide you chose. Learn more later in this section.