What are Citation Style Guides?

Style guides, also called style manuals, give instructions and examples of how to create footnotes and bibliographies in research papers. Many of them will also include advice on grammar and punctuation, research methods, and overall guidance on formatting the appearance of the final paper.

Although there are literally hundreds of different style guides, the most commonly used guides are the APA, Chicago Manual of Style, and the MLA.

What's a citation?

A citation is a brief description of an information source, giving enough data to enable someone else to quickly and easily find the source. Here are some examples of typical kinds of data needed for different kinds of information sources:

There are many other kinds of information sources beyond these basic one: videos or DVDs, dissertation or theses, book chapters, conference papers, and many others. The guides to the various types of style will give you some guidance on how to cite these sources, but there will inevitably be types of sources they don't cover. Remember, though, that the basic goal is to provide enough information to enable someone else to quickly and easily find the source.

Which style guide should I use?

In most cases, your professor will specify which one to use for a particular class. There is no "best" guide to use; you may wind up using different style manuals for different classes.

The general intent behind style guides is to provide full and complete documentation about the sources you use for a research project. Failure to indicate your sources while using other people's ideas is called plagiarism and is a serious instance of academic misconduct.

The links on the left of this page lead to resources for each of the three major style guides. In addition, InfoTree's section on style manuals covers these and other types of style guides.

Quick Citation Builder

If you want to create a quick citation in proper format, you can use the Citation Builder page from North Carolina State University. First choose the type of source you have (book, scholarly article, etc.), then fill in the blanks with appropriate information, and then generate the citation. You can copy the citation from the web page to your bibliography. It covers only a limited number of kinds of information sources, and produces citations in APA, CBE, and MLA formats.

Citation Machine

Citation Machine is an alternative to Citation Builder (above). Besides APA and MLA formats, it also includes the University of Chicago style as well as that of Turabian. It provides "citation building" for several more types of sources (e.g., newspaper articles or online encyclopedias) than Citation Builder.

RefWorks

RefWorks is an online resource for creating your own list of resources and using it to create fully-formatted bibliographies and reference lists. It is free to use as long as you are at Ohio University and is web-based, so you can login from any place that has an Internet connection. The link above leads to an extensive set of pages that explain how to create your RefWorks account and use it with numerous research databases.