Citation Help


Citing or documenting the sources used in your research serves three purposes:

  • gives proper credit to the authors of the words and ideas that you incorporated into your work.

  • allows those who are reading your work to locate your sources, in order to learn more about the ideas that you include in your paper and verify your research.

  • citing your sources consistently and accurately helps you avoid plagiarism in your writing.


Citation Styles

Different citation styles are used by different disciplines and subject areas. Each frequently-used style below links to a guide about how to use that style in writing and editing papers, and lists disciplines and subject areas that commonly use them. The instructor assigning your work is always the authority on what style to use for a particular assignment.


Citation Help

MLA 9 format (Courtesy of Purdue OWL)

MLA 9 Works Cited page format

MLA 9 in-text citations format

Citing an Image in MLA 9 (Courtesy of EasyBib)

APA format (Courtesy of Purdue OWL)


How to add a Works Cited or a Bibliography to a GOOGLE DOC


Copyright Information and Resources for Copyright-free Resources

Copyright quick reference sheet

Two of our databases, Gale and Britannica, contain copyright-free images and video, including auto-citations. Make sure you cite images found elsewhere by hand or EasyBib.

Vimeo (good for video, but some content blocked on campus)

Free soundbites from SoundBible

Free Music Bible (royalty free music clips)

Ben Sound (royalty free music clips)

To filter YouTube to Creative Commons videos:

  • Type in your search term

  • Click "filter"

  • Click "Creative Commons"

Knowing the proper term for your paper’s list of citations can be confusing. Do I call it a works cited page? Should it actually be called a bibliography? How is it different from a reference list? In this article, we explain what these three terms mean and how they are different or related to one another.

To begin, each citation style has its own way of naming the list of sources you used in your paper. Here we break down the differences in these list types, so that you can better understand which option works best for your work.

Works Cited

A “Works Cited” list is an alphabetical list of works cited, or sources you specifically called out while composing your paper. All works that you have quoted or paraphrased should be included. Works Cited is generally used when citing sources using MLA format (Modern Language Association) style, and sources should be listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name.

Example Works Cited entry:

Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution. Oxford UP, 2007.

References or “Reference List”

A “Reference List” is very similar to a Works Cited list, and is a term used when citing sources using APA format (American Psychological Association) style. The page should be titled “References,” and is arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Example References entry:

Middlekauff, R. (2007). The glorious cause: The American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

Bibliographies, on the other hand, differ greatly from Works Cited and References lists. In Works Cited and References, you only list items you have actually referred to and cited in your paper. A Bibliography, meanwhile, lists all the material you have consulted in preparing your essay, whether you have actually referred to and cited the work or not. This includes all sources that you have used in order to do any research. Bibliographies are often used in Chicago and Turabian citation styles. They usually contain a long reference that has a corresponding footnote within the body of the paper.

Example Bibliography entry:

Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.