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The way you create and format in-text citations and the way you create and format full citations will depend on the citation style guide you are using.
What's a citation style guide?
What's a citation style guide?
A citation style guide is a set of rules for how you indicate that you've used outside sources in your writing. A style guide will dictate the formatting of both in-text citations and full citations, such as what elements to include, the order of those elements, what should be capitalized, italicized, or bolded, whether your citations should be numbered, etc.
There are some commonly used style guides that you may already be familiar with including: MLA-style, APA-style, and Chicago-style. The details of these styles can be found in officially published handbooks that contain instructions and examples for how to format citations.
To the right you see the same journal article citation formatted according to three different styles. Notice the subtle differences between them.
In MLA style the article title has quotation marks around it and the publication year is right before the page numbers. Meanwhile, in APA style, the year comes right after the authors. And, there are several more differences you'll notice if you look closely and compare.
QUESTION 1. Citation style guides dictate how your citations should be formatted, including:
A. whether the title of the journal article should have quotation marks around it or not.
B. whether the publication year should appear after the author's names or not.
C. whether your in-text citations should be numbered or not.
D. all of the above.
(Answer at bottom of page.)As mentioned above, commonly used styles, like MLA, APA, and Chicago, provide handbooks with directions for how to format citations, but you can also find plenty of formatting details on websites such as Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (better known as Purdue OWL).
In fact, here are some direct links for you:
Note that sometimes you might be asked to use the citation style of a particular organization or a particular journal. For example, you might be told to use one of these styles:
American Sociological Association (ASA) style
Ecological Society of America (ESA) style
Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) style
etc.
Or, you may be told to format your citations in the same way as a particular journal such as:
American Sociological Review
Ecology
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
etc.
Ok, so what do you do in this situation? You can:
Search Google for the name of the organization or the name of the journal along with the words citation style to see if you find relevant websites with tips on how to format your citations properly.
Find an article published in the journal you've been told to use, or in a journal published by the society you've been told to use, and format your in-text and full citations in the same way you see them formatted within the text of the article and in the article's References Cited section of that article.
Ask for help from your instructor or a librarian.
FYI – Often these society and/or journal citation styles are a bit scant on examples – meaning: other than showing you how a journal article should be cited, you might not find much else. Use your best judgement to format citations for which you can find no example, or ask for advice from your instructor!
Is it easy and fun to use citation style guides?
Is it easy and fun to use citation style guides?
No. It's not easy or fun. There are two issues that make it especially difficult, in case you are wondering:
Style guides were developed at a time when sources existed in paper format only, and they have not adapted well to new forms of online publishing. Nor have they adapted well to another new development – our ability to access the same source from different databases or websites. Thus, citing has become considerably MORE difficult and confusing over time.
Some of the elements that make up citations, such as journal volumes and issues, are no longer particularly relevant when when we access sources online rather than in print. Nor are these elements as obvious and easy to find as they were when sources were in their print form.
Acknowledging that citing is difficult can help you endure it, but it doesn't change the fact that citing is critically important for all the reasons you learned about earlier in this lesson. So, you just have to deal with it as best you can, and try to stay in a cheerful mood.
How to find the necessary elements for a journal article citation.
How to find the necessary elements for a journal article citation.
Most of the time you can gather the elements you need to construct a journal article citation from the first page of the article's PDF. The details you need usually appear in small font at the top or bottom of the first page of the article. To the left is an example showing citation details at the top of the first page of a journal article.
Of course, depending on the citation style guide you are using, your journal article citation may also need to include a Digital Object Identifier, or DOI. You can usually find the DOI somewhere on the first page, if there is one – but note that not all articles have DOIs. If you are looking for the DOI, then look for something like this:
htts://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.05.006
10.1093/ajae/aaq063
It's also possible that your journal article citation may need to include the URL for the webpage where you obtained the article in its online form.
QUESTION 2. Open this journal article PDF: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/pdf/167358da7d2235e7a329bbc1d857e471feeacb79
Information about the journal title, volume, date, and DOI can be found:
A. At the top of the first page of the PDF.
B. At the bottom of the first page of the PDF.
C. On the left margin of the first page of the PDF.
D. On the right margin on the first page of the PDF.
(Answer at bottom of page.)FYI – There are a few quirky but common problems you're likely to encounter with journal article citations and you'll learn all about them on the next page of this lesson.
How to find the necessary elements for a book citation.
How to find the necessary elements for a book citation.
You can find the authors and title of a book on the cover or title page. The publisher, publication date, and place of publication may also be on the title page or somewhere in the first few pages. (It's quite a bit easier to deal with book citations, compared to journal article citations, if that offers you some solace.)
How to find the necessary elements for a website citation.
How to find the necessary elements for a website citation.
Ugh. Websites are a kind of a disaster. Basically, you should try to find a title, author, and date, but the only element that's likely to be obvious is the title. Also, the way you format website citations is quite variable, depending on the citation style guide you are using. Some style guides will allow you to use the site owner as the author, such as in the example below, where the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) would be considered the author of this page on Trench Foot. But, other style guides would consider this same site to have no author, because there is no person named as the writer.
The publication date is even trickier. In the example website below, how is it even possible that the page was last reviewed in 2005, but then updated in 2014? So, it's kind of unclear what you should put as the publication date. Don't worry, nobody will be injured or die if you just pick one or the other. Just do the best you can and don't lose any sleep over it.
What about formatting in-text citations?
What about formatting in-text citations?
The information provided above should help you gather the details you need to create full citations for the References Cited section of your paper. You'd then consult your style guide to format your citations correctly. But what about your in-text citations? Your style guide will also show you how in-text citations should be formatted.
In case you want to take another look, the first page of this lesson shows lots of different examples of in-text citations. Note that sometimes they are numbered and sometimes they include a few details about the publication being cited (such as the author and year). Basically, the way they should look will depend entirely on how your style guide tells you they should look!
QUESTION 3. Using a citation style guide is easy and straightforward, not to mention kinda fun; it's unlikely you'll ever run into problems or questions when using a style guide to format citations.
true
false
What's next?
What's next?
Answers to questions on this page:Question 1. DQuestion 2. AQuestion 3. false
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