Sources: How to Cite Sources: From Sources to Citations

Table of contents

How to cite sources

From sources to citations

Sources types

Fields

Citation formats

Citation styles

THE WORLD OF SOURCES is large and diverse. Citations serve as road maps, guiding readers through that world to the particular sources you have used in your scholarly work. Different academic disciplines often rely on different types of sources; they inhabit different continents in the world of sources. Yet in writing citations, all scholars traverse a similar set of choices that, through several centuries of scholarly practice, has become quite regularized.
To move from the world of sources to the construction of a citation for a particular source requires at least five sequential choices: ¹

1	Select from the world of sources a particular source.
2	Identify the type or the medium of that source. Undergraduate writers commonly use about twenty types of sources, such as book, thesis, Web site, journal article, CD-ROM, government publication, etc.
3	Determine the fields required to describe the particular source type, and extract from the source the relevant information for these fields. Scholarly practice has identified a small set of fields for each source type. Some fields, such as "author," "title," or "year," may be used to characterize many source types. Other fields, such as "volume," "publisher," "edition," or "availability" (for Internet addresses), are specific to fewer source types.
4	Select the format for your citation. Format determines where the various components of the citation appear in your work. Most academic writers currently use one of three formats: parenthetical, author-date (a slight variation on the parenthetical), or notes (either footnotes or endnotes). Parenthetical and author-date citation formats must be accompanied by a List of Works Cited at the end of the paper. Papers employing a notes format also often include a final List of Works Cited.
5	Select the style for your citation. Style determines how information is arrayed within a citation of a given source type. Various academic disciplines and their related periodicals employ different styles. For example, the MLA (Modern Language Association of America), Science, and APA (American Psychological Association) styles specify different rules for punctuation, capitalization, and the arrangement of fields in citations of a journal article.

Thus all citations are comprised of given fields, determined by source type and arranged according to given styles and formats. Reference database software used to manage bibliographic information and prepare your citations, such as EndNote[TM], force you to think explicitly about these five choices, as you move from sources to citations. Just as word processing in the 1980s dramatically changed how scholarly papers were written, so too has bibliographic software in the 1990s simplified the process of preparing consistent citations.
Nonetheless, different academic disciplines often employ different styles and formats of citations. Before completing your first assignment for a course always consult with your instructor to learn how he or she wishes you to cite your sources.

1	The following description and vocabulary for the citation-writing process have been prompted by the conceptual structure of software such as EndNote[TM], a reference database and bibliography application.