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Research » Citing Sources

There are several ways to tell your reader where you got your information, or cite your sources. These are known as documentation styles. If you are writing a psychology paper, you might use one style; if you are writing a paper for a history class, you might use another. Ask your teacher or tutor which documentation style you should use in your paper. Here are five very common styles:
Students in the humanities often use the MLA style of documentation. In MLA style, you document your sources in two separate ways:
  1. Within the body of the paper, using in-text citations.
  2. At the end of the paper, providing a list of sources titled Works Cited.
Now, let's look at the way we cite sources when we quote, using MLA style.

There are two ways to do it. Here are examples of the two kinds of quotation citations:

  • Baseball dominated New York during the Forties. The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Yankees transformed "the huge metropolis into a small town of neighborhood rooting" (Fromer 32).
    • In this case, the name of the author and page numbers are cited in parenthesis.
  • Harvey Fromer believes that the period between 1947 and 1957 was "the last golden age of baseball" (32) in New York City.
    • In this case, the author's name is cited in the text and page numbers are cited in parenthesis directly after the quotation.

Later, at the end of the paper, you must include information about the title of the book, the publisher, and the date of publication. This information is known as a Works Cited list.



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