Research Tutorial

Citation Formats

Different academic disciplines have different ways of formatting citations. English/literature use a style called MLA. Psychology (and most of the social sciences) use one called APA. History uses one called Chicago-Turabian. Medical fields, business, and engineering all have their own styles as well.

They're all just slightly different ways of presenting the same information. Make sure to ask your professor what citation style you should use if your assignment sheet or syllabus doesn't say.

In this tutorial, we will be showing examples of MLA and APA citation styles, as those are the two most commonly used.

Citing Books:
The basic format for book citations is as follows:

MLA:
Last name, First name. Title of Book. Publisher, Publication Date.

Example:
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin, 1987. 

APA:
Author, A. A. (year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher.

Example:
Calfee, R. C., & Valencia, R. R. (1991). APA guide to preparing manuscripts for journal publication. American Psychological Association.

As you can see, all the information we talked about above is there in both styles. It's just in different order, with different punctuation rules.

Citing Journal Articles:
MLA:
Author(s). "Title of Article." Title of Journal, volume, issue, year, pages, DOI or URL.

Example:

Bagchi, Alaknanda. "Conflicting Nationalisms: The Voice of the Subaltern in Mahasweta Devi's Bashai Tudu." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, 1996, pp. 41-50.

APA:
Author, A. A., Author, B. B., and Author, C.C. (Year). Title of article. Title of journal, volume number(issue number), pages. doi:http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy.

Example:
Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(3), 5-13.

Or (electronic article):
Brownlie, D. (2007). Toward effective poster presentations: An annotated bibliography. European Journal of Marketing, 41, 1245-1283. doi:10.1108/03090560710821161