Tutorials on how to cite your sources correctly according to four common style manuals.

The word citation comes from the verb “to cite,” which comes from the Latin word for “commanding” or “summoning.” It’s as if you are asking—or perhaps commanding—someone to come and help you plead your case or make an argument. That person provides supporting evidence for your argument. You are looking for support. It’s the same in an essay or assignment when you need to “summon” someone else’s ideas as evidence for your argument. This could be using textual evidence from a novel to make a point about imagery or symbolism, or it could be scientific evidence to help support the results of an experiment that you have conducted. While there are many different styles available to choose from when you are citing sources in your writing, the fundamentals of citation remain constant. Regardless of which documentation style you choose there are always two important parts:

• In-text citation: A signal in the text that alerts your reader to the places in your writing where you are using someone else’s words or ideas, figures, images, etc.
• Reference list or works cited: This is a later section, found at the end of a paper, where you present more detailed and precise information on the sources of the information you are citing.

To begin with, citing your sources allows your reader to see that you have researched and explored your topic and the detail with which you have done so, by transparently showing the sources of ideas or words you have incorporated into your writing. It also gives credit to the creators of the content—the words or ideas—you include in your work.

This is important, not just to give credit to the authors whose words and ideas you reference, but because consistent and clear citation of sources is how you can avoid plagiarism, a serious form of academic dishonesty in which you present ideas or words as your own, when they are, in fact, not your own. There can be serious consequences for plagiarism whether it is intentional or not, so understanding how to properly use citation to signal to your reader when you are referencing outside material is crucial. Citation allows you to clearly and precisely signal to your reader when you are incorporating other people’s words and ideas into your own work.

Finally, using citation to document the sources of the ideas and words you use in your work allows your readers to locate these sources to either assess the accuracy of the way you used the sources, or to assess the sources you’ve accessed for themselves, and also it allows your readers to do further research on the topics you have cited. Essentially, proper citation allows your reader to know when you’ve used outside information, it gives credit to the authors of that information and it allows your reader access to the information you’ve used. It also allows you to add credibility to your writing by demonstrating that there is support for your arguments!

There are as many different style manuals as there are different areas of research and publications. The goal is to standardize how things are written and cited so that there is a level of consistency across a field of research or a specific publication. Magazines and newspapers have their own style guides that provide writers with guidelines about capitalization, citation, punctuation, and other issues. Publishing companies have style manuals that ensure that the books they publish are standardized.

Areas of research aim for standardization as well—so this is why you have MLA style for subjects like literature and humanities, or APA style for social sciences, or CSE style for science. The standardization makes it not only easy for people to read, but it also makes it easy for people doing research to find sources and make sure that what is being written and published is verifiable. This is key to building credibility as well as building knowledge. To ensure that a text is trustworthy, scholars use a process of “peer review” where different experts anonymously review potential publications and check the reliability of references and the basis for claims. Style manuals make this process possible. By learning about style, you are taking steps toward being part of a scholarly community and building knowledge.