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WRI 123/124: Fight the Power

The resources I've pulled together for this guide will be helpful to get you started on your research journey.

Citing Your Sources

The citations and bibliography in any scholarly work have two purposes:

  • to acknowledge the author's debt to the work of others
  • to enable the reader to locate the sources consulted by the author

To do that, your citations and bibliography need to include complete and accurate information about your sources, arranged in a consistent way that does not confuse your reader. At this point in your research, you will all have encountered unhelpful footnotes with mysterious abbreviations, incorrect information, or other problems. 

There are many ways to arrange the information. This is called "style" and there are several common styles in use. Commonly used styles in academic writing include The Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, and APA.  

Where to start

An overview and summary of each style is found at Purdue OWL Research and Citation Resources

The full set of rules for each style is found in these publications: