SPAN 3000 Gateway to Linguistics

The primary reasons for citing sources when presenting research are:

• to give credit to the authors whose work you have drawn upon, and  
• to allow readers to track down your sources, should they wish to do so. 

​There are many style guides for formatting citations and creating bibliographies. The major styles are:

• MLA Style, from the Modern Language Association;
• APA Style, from the American Psychological Association, and 
• Chicago Style, from the University of Chicago Press

These tools are helpful for quick questions and basic citation formatting.

These tools allow you to gather citations and PDFs in one place and then quickly create a bibliography. You have to start using them well before your paper is due, however.