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Citation Styles: Home

Need Help Citing Sources?

This guide provides quick access to examples and guidelines for some of the more frequently used citation styles.

Select from the above tabs for assistance with APA, MLA, Chicago, or CSE style. More style options can be found within the "Additional Styles" tab.

Always check first with your professor or editor to see if a particular style is required.  Question

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Citation Management Tools

For information on citation management tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote, please see the Citation Management Tools page.

Citation Examples

Plagiarism

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to "plagiarize" means:

  • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
  • to use (another's production) without crediting the source
  • to commit literary theft
  • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

All of the following are considered plagiarism:​

  • copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
  • failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
  • giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
  • changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
  • turning in someone else's work as your own
  • turning in a paper your previously wrote for another class without getting permission from all professors involved

​Source: "What is Plagiarism?" (2017). Turnitin. http://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism.

Information Needed

Wondering how to identify the pieces you need for your citations? The following examples show how you would find the information for an article and for a book just by looking at the first page or two of the resource.

Please note the examples use APA style, but are applicable to the other styles as well in terms of where to locate certain elements to build your citations.

To cite an article in APA, you will need to know the following information (where applicable):

Author(s) or Editor(s), Title of Article, Title of Journal, Issue Number,

Volume Number, Publication Year, DOI/URL, Page Numbers

You can usually find this information on the first page of an electronic article. For print articles, you might have to consult the title page of the journal in addition to the article. The image below shows the first page of an article from a database and where the needed information is located:

First page of a scholarly article with highlighted citation elementsExample of an APA article citation

It is not necessary to make note of which database you found the article in for APA, unless your professor asks you to do so.

To cite a book in APA, you will need to know the following information:

Author(s) or Editor(s), Title of Book, Publisher, Publication Year

You should be able to find this information within the first few pages of the book. For example, in the image below, the title page and the back of the title page contain everything you need to write the citation.

Pictures of the title page and back of the title page of a book with highlighted citation elements

Left: Title Page; Right: Back of Title PageExample of an APA book citation

As an easy reference, please see the digital version of the citation guides we keep at the Information Desk:

Credit

This entire guide has been adapted from SUNY Morrisville's "Citation Styles" LibGuide and the template has been used with their permission.