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Why Cite?
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
Citation Tools
- Purdue OWLPurdue's OWL (Online Writing Lab) provides guides to MLA, APA, and Chicago styles, as well as advice on research, writing and citation.
- How To Cite Data (MSU Library)A concise page with helpful tips on citing your data and examples from three official style guides (APA, MLA, and Chicago). Includes information about how to cite tables, datasets, and citing within text. From Michigan State University Libraries.
- RefWorks This link opens in a new windowRefWorks is an online research management, writing, and collaboration tool designed to help researchers gather, manage, store, and share information and generate citations and bibliographies.
- ZoteroZotero is a free tool designed to help you gather, manage and share information about books, articles, web pages and other digital objects that you are using in your research, and to generate citations and bibliographies. Zotero is a Mozilla browser plugin. You can choose to gather your data on your hard drive (if you are working mainly from one computer), or on a flash drive or a network (if you frequently access your data at multiple workstations).
