Athletes: A Library Guide for You: Citing Your Sources

There are a number of citation styles used in scholarly writing. Your assignment may specify which one you should use, or let you choose for yourself. If you're not sure, check with your professor. The most commonly used styles are:

• APA  (American Psychological Association) - psychology. business, education, social sciences
• MLA  (Modern Language Association) -  English and the humanities
• Chicago or Turabian  (University of Chicago Press) - history,humanities, social sciences
• CSE (Council of Science Editors) - biology [formerly known as CBE - Council of Biology Editors]
• ASA (American Sociology Association) - sociology
• APSA (American Political Science Association) - political science

There are comprehensive lists at the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) and Wikipedia. Also look at:

It is important to cite your sources for many reasons:

• To give credit to other researchers and acknowledge their ideas 
• Help readers identify and locate the sources you used
• To demonstrate to the reader and your professor that you conducted research on a topic
• To avoid plagiarism!!

Barns, Bill, and Gene Ambaum. "Unshelved." Comic strip. Unshelved. April 16, 2012. Accessed August 31, 2017. www.unshelved.com

Citation generators create the citation for you.

CAUTION - generators are not magic, they require YOU to enter the title, author, publication info, etc into the form. Make sure to spell everything correctly and check the generated citation against a style guide to insure your citation is correctly formated.