Citation Styles 

This page contains general information about citations and citation styles. Click the blue tabs along the top of the guide to get instructions for specific styles like APA or MLA.

There are several reasons to cite your sources:

Plagiarism is submitting another person's work as your own.  This includes copying, paraphrasing, or summarizing someone else's work without giving credit.

Simply failing to cite your sources properly is a very common -- and often accidental -- form of plagiarism.  For more information about plagiarism, see the GSU Academic Honesty Policy.

Most academic work draws upon the works of others; therefore, citing your sources is an important part of the scholarly writing process.

Citations include the key elements that allow your sources to be identified and located. These elements vary depending upon the type of resource.

For example:

• Book citations include the author, title, place of publication, publisher, and date

• Article citations include the author, article title, journal title, volume and issue number, pages numbers, and date

The specific format of your citations will depend upon the documentation style you are using. Different disciplines use different styles - check with your professor if you are unsure of which one to use.

Commonly used styles include APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian. Each of these has an official style guide. These manuals contain detailed examples on citing a wide variety of sources. In addition, they contain information about proper formating such as margin and font size.

For most styles, you cite your sources in two places:

1) Within your paper - Immediately after using a source, include a parenthetical citation, footnote or endnote.

2) At the end of your paper - Assemble a complete list of your sources. This is knows as a "Bibliography," "Reference List" or "Works Cited" section.

Use software like EndNote and Zotero to manage your sources - download citations from library databases; export the bibliography into your paper. Compare the features of some different citation manager programs here.

EndNote is a free download for GSU students, faculty and staff.  It's a desktop application that runs on Windows or MacOS.

Zotero is a free Firefox plugin that easily saves citations from GIL and most library databases, as well as sites like Amazon and the New York Times online.

Both programs have Word plugins that automatically create bibliographies in the style of your choice.