When citing the books, articles, and other materials collected for a research paper, you must organize the important information, identifying the author, title, publisher, and date of the work according to a specific style.
You may use a citation manager program such as Zotero to will help you organize, store, and cite your sources. The videos below demonstrate the basics of creating citations and will help you get started. (Note: You are smarter than the computer. Be sure to check your citations even after Zotero formats them for you.)
I'm going to walk you through how to do this by citing an article from one of McKay Library's databases according to MLA 8 citation style. This will go pretty fast because the point of this tutorial isn't to tell you everything there is to know about citation. There's just too much. The point is to demystify the process a bit. We start with the author. It's usually somewhere around the top of the article, and if you got it from a database, there'll be more information in the place where you downloaded it, or, depending on the database, there might be a helpful information page at the front of the article. The author is Edward I. Condren, but we can't just copy the name right over. MLA requires the author's name to be inverted. Condren, comma, Edward I. And we only have one author, so we add a period to indicate this part's done. The article's title comes next. Two things you should know about article titles. The first thing is that when you copy them into a citation, you format them by MLA rules. See, this title is printed in all caps, but MLA calls for it to be in title case. That's a technical term for capitalizing the first letters of all the important words. Like this. The other thing you should know is that article titles are always surrounded by quotation marks. In MLA, quotation marks indicate small works inside of larger works. For example, this is an article inside of a journal. Anyway, we close the title with a period, which goes inside the final quote. That's the rule, and it just looks nice. Your citation so far should look like this. After the article title comes the journal. This is where the article lives, or what MLA calls the container. In this case, the container is a journal called the Chaucer Review. The journal title is usually found in smaller type, maybe at the bottom of the article, or maybe on your handy information page. Containers get their titles in italics, because they're larger works, and because MLA says so. No period after this title, though, because journals don't just have titles. They have volumes, issues, and dates. Each volume contains multiple issues. It's kind of like how TV shows are produced in seasons and episodes. Seasons are like volumes, episodes are like issues. This article came from Volume 10, Issue 1. We indicate this by putting a comma after the journal title, a space, then VOL, that's short for volume, a period, a space, the number 10, a comma, a space, NO, that's short for number, a period, a space, and the number 1. Next we put a comma after the issue number, like so, a space, and drop in the date. Dates can be a little funky in MLA. Your article might give you just a year, a month in a year, a season in a year, or something else along those lines. The rule is this, include as much information about the publication date as the source gives you. In this case, we see the issue is published in summer 1975, so we include that. And we still aren't finished with this section, because we need the page numbers. And what do we do when we aren't finished with the section? Right, another comma, a space, and we indicate page numbers with the abbreviation PP, stands for pages plural if you are curious, and then a period, a space, the starting page, 87, a hyphen, and the ending page, 95, followed by AHA! A period! Finally. Done correctly, your journal information should look like this. Lovely. But we're not done. At the end of the citation, we have to indicate the database the article came from. I found this one in JSTOR, which is spelled with all caps, that's its actual brand name, so we don't convert it to title case. Like all databases, JSTOR is also a container, so its title takes italics. Now let's talk URLs and DOIs. You'll need one or the other, but they're not equal. DOIs, that's short for Digital Object Identifiers, are preferable. Look for that first, starting on our handy cover sheet, and if you can find one, drop it into your citation like this. Put a comma after the database title, a space, then the lowercase letters DOI, a colon, followed by the number itself. And it might seem odd, but there's no space between that colon and the first character of the DOI. Then add a period to close the section. If you can't find a DOI, that's okay, you just need a URL. But not any URL will do. Look for a link labeled permalink or stable URL. These are links that are guaranteed not to change, and they're usually way shorter and less hideous than the link you'll find in the address bar of your browser. Put a comma after the database title, a space, and then the URL. Look closely, see how the URL is black. There's no HTTP colon forward slash forward slash, and there's no underline anywhere to be seen. It should always look like that. Then you end the section with a period. Done. Oh, there we go, a complete citation for an article from a database. Yours should look a lot like this. If they don't, you're probably doing something wrong. Oh, and one more thing, indentation. MLA citations require a hanging indent. That means the first line of each citation starts at the left margin, but all subsequent lines are indented. Don't use the tab key for this. The spacing can be off. Instead, give it a hanging indent using your word processing software. Here's how to do this in Microsoft Word. Highlight your citations. Make sure you're in the home ribbon. Then open paragraph settings using this tiny little box. In the indentation section, open the menu labeled special, select hanging, and make sure it's set at a half inch. MLA also requires citations to be double spaced, so while we're in here, let's open the line spacing menu and select double. Hit OK, and there we go. A double spaced citation with a hanging indent. That's the work cited entry, but what about in-text citation? Thankfully that's not so bad, although there are a few ways to go about it depending on whether or not you mention the author's name in the sentence. If you refer to the article without using the author's name, we give credit by putting his last name in parentheses at the end of the sentence, followed by the page number where the information comes from, like this. Easy enough. Now if you do mention the author's name in the sentence, we only need to share the page number in parentheses, like so. So that's citing an article according to MLA 8th edition. Before you go, let me make one last recommendation. Get a copy of the MLA Handbook. It'll tell you how to cite anything and everything. We keep a copy at the circulation desk, and if you'd like some guidance, our friendly librarians would be happy to help, on chat or in person.
I'm going to walk you through citing an article from one of the McKay Libraries databases according to APA 7 citation style. This will go pretty fast because the point of this video isn't to tell you everything there is to know about APA citation style. There's just too much. The point is to demystify the process a bit. First, make sure to have a copy of the article you want to cite. After sometimes all of the information we need can be found on the first page. We start with the authors. APA requires authors' first names to be reduced to initials and for their last names to come first. It makes it easier to alphabetize. We've got two authors and we need to slot their names into the citation in the same order they're listed on the article. Now for the punctuation. Last name, comma, space, first initial, period, space, middle initial if we see one, period, comma, space, ampersand, space, second author's last name, comma, space, first initial, and a period. Yeah, this is tedious, but every space and piece of punctuation matters so we gotta get it right. Next we share when the article was published. It's usually listed at the top or bottom of the first page. We only need the four-digit year, no months or days, even if the article includes it. Add a space after the period, put the year in parentheses, and follow it with another period. The article's title comes after that. Titles of scholarly articles look like sentences and they're often set in large type near the top of the first page. Title titles in APA must be written in sentence case, which means only the first word of a sentence, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns get capitalized. See how the original here is written in title case with most of the words capitalized? In a formatting fight between APA and the original, APA wins every time. So let's fix it. The only capitalized words should be the first word in the title, the first word after the colon, and any proper nouns, which we don't have here. Once that's done, we close it with a period and move on. So for scholarly articles, there are actually two titles you have to deal with. Article title and journal title, and of course they have to be formatted differently. Journal titles are typically printed in much smaller text than article titles, and you can find them at the top or bottom of the page, usually with numbers next to them that indicate volume and issue. In this case, it's hiding way up here. Unlike article titles, which take sentence case, journal titles take title case. All the main words get, or rather stay, capped. Journal titles are placed in italics as well. This journal title is already in italics and title case, but if it weren't, we'd have to reformat it. Oh, and it's in bold type on the article? And APA doesn't use bold type for journal titles, so we remove it. In a formatting fight between APA and the original, APA wins every time. But we don't stop there. Journals are published periodically, so they have volumes and issues we have to deal with. These are usually labeled, and even if they're not, volume comes before issue. If you're having trouble figuring out which is which, or if one of the numbers is missing, ask a librarian. After the journal title comes a comma and a space, followed by the volume number, 19. It takes italics as well. Why? Because APA says so. That's the answer to a lot of things. The issue number, 3, comes after that, but no italics this time. Instead, we put it in parentheses. Okay, check this out. There are no words indicating volume or issue, just the formatting. This is how it's supposed to be. It's a code, the italicized number is always the volume, the number in parentheses is always the issue. After the issue number comes a comma, a space, and the page range. Start page, 230, hyphen, end page, 252. No PP or the word pages. Everything after the journal title should be a string of numbers and punctuation. Clean and simple. Then a period at the end to show the sections finished. Okay, now let's check if your article has a DOI, that's a digital object identifier. It's a unique string of code that your audience can use to quickly and easily track down your references. If the article was published after about the year 2000, it probably has one. This article has it right here. You don't just copy it, though. Huh. Let me pause here. That's actually really good advice for every part of a citation. Don't just copy and paste. Everything must be formatted according to APA guidelines, or it's wrong and you make a librarian sad. DOIs need to be formatted as URLs. Like this. Start with this. Then you add the DOI after the forward slash to complete it. Don't put a period or anything after the DOI or you'll mess up the URL. You can check and make sure you did it right by using the link. If you get a webpage with your article's info on it, you win. See? But what happens if there isn't a DOI? The answer, I'm sorry to say, is it depends and it's too complicated to explain here. For more information, see APA's webpage for DOIs and URLs. No, and we can't forget indentation. APA requires citations to take a hanging indent. That means the first line of each citation starts at the left margin and all subsequent lines are indented. Do not use tab for this. It gets the spacing wrong. Instead, give it a hanging indent using your word processing software. Here's how to do this in Microsoft Word. Highlight your citations. Make sure you're in the home ribbon, then open paragraph settings using this tiny little box. In the indentation section, open the menu labeled special, select hanging, and make sure it's set at a half inch. APA also requires citations to be double-spaced, so while we're in here, let's open the line spacing menu and select double. Hit OK and ta-da! We've got a double-spaced citation with a hanging indent. Now we're finally in the home stretch. Can you feel it? The citation's done! But what about actually quoting this article in your paper? For that, you gotta have an in-text citation. That's what tells your reader that you're using someone else's idea and where to find it in your list of references. For every article in your references, there must be a corresponding in-text citation and vice versa. The in-text citation has three pieces. The author's last names, the year of publication, and the page number. How you format this information depends on whether or not you choose to mention the author's by name in the text. This is a stylistic choice. No right or wrong here. If you don't use the author's names in the text, then the in-text citation looks like this, with everything in parentheses right after the quote. If you do use the author's names in the text, it looks like this, with the year in parentheses after the name and the page number in parentheses after the quote. So that's an example of APA 7 citation style. Before you go, let me make one last recommendation. Get a copy of the APA Manual of Style. It'll tell you how to cite anything and everything. We keep a copy at the circulation desk, and if you'd like some guidance, our friendly librarians would be happy to help, on chat or in person.
