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Citation, or, Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

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Why Cite a Source?

-To acknowledge that you used someone else’s research or ideas.

-To help readers look up the sources you used for the readers’ own research needs.

-To indicate your engagement with your own discipline (through your knowledge of advanced concepts, points of controversy, and current developments).

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How?

1. Use in-text referencing in the body (main text) of the document to identify the source in a compact, unobtrusive way.

2. Use a bibliography at the end of the document to give the reader all the information needed to look up the source.

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1. In-text Referencing

-When your document indicates that it is using a source in some way, indicate the source by using some kind of abbreviated form.

-To keep the referencing unobtrusive, use the least amount of information required to identify that source clearly.

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2. Bibliography-At the end of the document, list all items for which an in-text reference exists in the body of the document.

-Readers must be able look up all in-text references here so they can find the full publication information (also called “citation”)

Types of Citation Styles

• Many styles (or standards) of citation exist.

• The styles are developed by professional organizations for use by their members (hence the proliferation of styles).

• All citation styles have some method of in-text referencing that links to a fuller description of the source.

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Three Common Methods of Citation

• Author-Date, E.g. American Psychological Association (APA) style

In-text citations are the surname of the author and publication date of the document.

E.g., (Sanchez 2007)

A bibliography lists the full information of all sources in alphabetical order by author.

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Common Methods(cont.)• Author-Page (E.g., MLA Documentation

Style)

In-text citations are to the surname of the author and page number or range on which the information occurs.

E.g., (Sanchez 21)

A bibliography lists the full information of all sources in alphabetical order by author.

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Common Methods (cont.)• Footnote (E.g., Chicago Manual of Style)

In-text citations are superscripted numbers added to the end of sentences that contain information from a source.

E.g., Sanchez shows that the contrary is true.4

The full description of a source appears at the bottom of the same page. Sometimes all footnotes appear at the end of the document (and so are called endnotes); the document might also have a bibliography.

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Example 1a: A Body Paragraph with Parenthetical Referencing

James did not fight in the war himself, nor did his older brother William. But his younger brothers Wilky and Robertson did. In fact, Wilky was severely wounded during the assault of Fort Wagner by Robert Shaw's black regiment, the 54th. In addition, many of James' acquaintances died or were wounded during the War (Hoffmann and Hoffmann 529). Battle-scarred men, many with amputated limbs, were constant reminders of the war in post-bellum America. As Elaine Scarry writes in her book The Body in Pain, injured bodies provide a "memorialization function” after a war: they act as monuments to war, in particular to the role of the human body in war's political contestation (121).

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Works Cited

Hoffmann, Charles, and Tess Hoffmann. "Henry James and the Civil War." New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 62.4 (1989): 529-52. Print.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.

Example 1b: The Works Cited Page

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Example 2a: A Body Paragraph with Parenthetical Referencing for Poetry

“Closing Time” juxaposes allusions to religion and

popular culture. For example, when “the Holy Spirit’s crying, ‘Where’s the beef?’” (17), the poem puts into the mouth of the Christian deity an advertising slogan from the Wendy’s restaurant chain.

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Works Cited

Cohen, Leonard. “Closing Time.” The Harbrace Anthology of Literature. 3rd ed. Ed. Jon C. Stott, Raymond E. Jones, and Rick Bowers. Toronto: Nelson Thomson Learning, 2002. 364-65. Print.

Example 2b: The Works Cited Page

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Example 3: A Body Paragraph with Formatting for Poetry Quotations

In the third stanza “Nineteen” juxtaposes inaction with the narrator’s sudden action: “upstairs the beds are quiet. / at three AM you smash the twisted iron gate and run to the cab” (25-26). The next stanza continues, however, the tendency to represent the narrator as passive:

four AM and you sit in the hallway listening to the rainemptying out through the drains in the balconya stench in the bathroomknees drawn up in that classic position, you’re alive (30-34)

[Use the indentation method (indent with no quotation marks) when quoting four or more lines. Otherwise, put quotation marks around the words and run the lines together like prose, using slashes to separate the lines]

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Works Cited

Lau, Evelyn. “Nineteen.” The Harbrace Anthology of Literature. 3rd ed. Ed. Jon C. Stott, Raymond E. Jones, and Rick Bowers. Toronto: Nelson Thomson Learning, 2002. 716-17. Print.

See the Supplementary Materials section of the course website for more models.

Example 2b: The Works Cited Page