How Should you Cite your Paper?

 Whether you are an undergraduate student or pursuing your master’s degree or even a professional researcher, you will be familiar with a wide range of essays. 

What is plagiarism? 

An original piece of work is considered intellectual property and therefore, stealing or borrowing another person’s work or trying to pass it off as one’s own is stealing intellectual property or intellectual fraud, more commonly referred to as plagiarism.   

The internet makes plagiarism incredibly easy. With the vast amount of sources of information available online it is easy to pass off someone else’s work as one’s own without giving due credit. This is where plagiarism checkers come in. Plagiarism checkers have a larger data base than those openly available on search engines, which often include a few articles and books not published online, making them a reliable method of detecting accidental plagiarism 

 

Most common types of citation formats 

APA 

APA stands for American Psychological Association, and it is the format typically used to cite research papers and documents in social and behavioral sciences. In other words, the APA format is the style guide used by the American Psychological Association to aid reading comprehension in social and behavioral sciences. 

References 

An APA reference page is placed after the main body of the paper, before the appendices. The reference page must include all the sources used in in-text citations. A reference page is usually auto-created by google docs, MS-word, or any online citation generator you used to keep a record of all your in-text citations. The following points are essential to keep in mind while creating a references page: 

• Place the section label "References" in bold at the top of the page (centered). 

• Invert the author's name; that is, the author's last name should come before their first name. 

• Order the references alphabetically according to the first letter of the author's last name. 

• Double-space all text. 

• Apply a hanging indent of 0.5 inches. 

Omit suffixes (e.g., "Jr.") and titles (e.g., "Ph.D." or "Dr."), and only specify the year of publication, not the day and month. 

Parenthetical vs. narrative citations 

The in-text citation can be placed in parentheses or naturally integrated into a sentence. 

• Parenthetical: There is a correlation between social media usage and anxiety symptoms in teenagers (Parker, 2019). 

• Narrative: Parker (2019) found a correlation between social media usage and anxiety symptoms in teenagers. 

If a work has two authors, separate their names with an ampersand (&) in a parenthetical citation or "and" in a narrative citation. If there are three or more authors, only include the first author's last name followed by "et al.," meaning "and others." 

Their abbreviations know as group authors (e.g., CDC), are written in full the first time and are abbreviated in subsequent citations. 

 

MLA 

MLA Citation may be classified into two categories:  

1. In-text citations and 

2. full-text citations 

MLA citations follow the following general order: 

The format followed for full- citations is: 

Author's Last name, First name. "Title of Source." Title of Container, other contributors, version, numbers, publisher, publication date, location. 

• Put a period after the author's name. 

• When you are citing a source in its entirety, use italics and quotation marks to do so. 

• The publisher should be placed in the citation before the date of publication. 

• While writing the date, including all the information you could find in the source, there are no specific instructions regarding formatting the date in particular but ensuring that you maintain it throughout the document once you start with a particular format. 

• Location indicates the source where you can find the document. If this is a URL, do not include the HTTP:// or HTTPS:// while citing the location. 

 

In-text citations: 

When you are paraphrasing information from a particular source or using a direct quote, you must use in-text citations to grant credibility to the original work and avoid plagiarism. In contrast to the APA form of authority, the MLA format uses the author's last name and the page number of the work cited in parentheses. You can format it in any of the two following ways: 

• "Direct quote" or Paraphrase (Author's last name and page number). 

OR 

• Author's Last Name states, "Direct Quote" or paraphrase (page number). 

In case your source is from a website without page numbers, you can any of the following abbreviations to make your work easier. 

• If the source has designated paragraph numbers, use par. or pars 

• If the source has designated sections, use sec. Or secs. 

• If the source has designated chapters, use ch. or CHS. 

 

Chicago 

The Chicago citation format is a citation style that has two varieties. You may either use: 

• the notes and bibliography citation format or  

• the author-date citation format.  

The former citation format, the notes, and the bibliography format use footnotes or endnotes to cite sources instead of in-text citations. This format is usually preferred by language and other humanities students. Each footnote or endnote as a superscript number that corresponds to a reference listed in the bibliography. A footnote is a note found at the end of a word or page in superscript. When you come across numbers after a word written like this 1, you have probably come across a footnote. Clicking on it will link you to the full citation. Endnotes are found at the end of the chapter instead of after words or the end of pages. The advantage of this system is that:  

• It can accommodate even sources that do not fit into the restraints of the author-date system.  

• Moreover, it allows for more comfortable reading as it does not abruptly interrupt the reader with a citation and links to them instead. 

The author-date format is more widely used in natural and social sciences. In-text citations in this format involve stating the author's last name followed by the date of publication of the article, journal, or paper in parentheses. Each in-text citation usually corresponds to a full source in the bibliography. Aside from the use of numbered notes versus parenthetical references in the text, the two systems share a similar style. 

You should make citations in the following order: the author name(s), page title, website title, web address, and date published or accessed. The first author's name should be reversed in the bibliography, with a comma placed after the last name and a period after the first name (or any middle name). Titles and affiliations associated with the author should be omitted. 

The easiest method to cite using the Author-Date formatting system is to move the year published in the citation to follow the author's name.