Termpaper citation format guide
Often, writing style is as important to a research paper as the content itself. While it’s your arguments that really matter, professors can sometimes give you credit for following proper citation and tone. Likewise, a well-researched but wrongly cited paper can get unnecessary deductions. Here’s a quick guide to some of the citation guides used in most colleges.
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Which one should you use?
The most commonly used citation styles are APA, MLA, Chicago and Turabian. A less common format called the AMA is reserved for papers in the medical field. Professors often assign the format beforehand, but others expect you to know. Each format is used for a particular field or subject matter.
- APA – psychology, education, sociology, social sciences
- MLA – arts, humanities, and literature
- Chicago – usually for non-scholarly pieces like magazine articles and book reviews
- Turabian – a universal style designed for all academic papers
Basic style rules for APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian
APA: The APA style lists in order all the document features such as citations, references, headings, footnotes, figures, and appendices. It also uses Harvard referencing, which means the author and the date are briefly cited in parenthesis within the text and fully credited in a Bibliography or Works Cited section. An APA citation would look like (McLuhan, 1978) or (McLuhan: 1978).
A typical APA paper will include a title page, abstract, body (with all necessary subheadings), references, author notes, and separate lists of footnotes, figures and tables.
MLA: MLA style also uses inline parenthetical citations, but only to direct the reader to a more comprehensive bibliography (commonly called “Works Cited”) at the end of the body. Footnotes or endnotes may also be used. Unlike APA style, MLA’s parenthetical citations may include the source’s page number in place of the publication year. So an MLA citation that goes (McLuhan, 83) will refer you to page 83 of a work by McLuhan cited in your paper.
To make the references clear, MLA style allows more selective lists such as “Works Consulted” or “Selected Bibliography.” It also encourages the use of signal phrases, wherein the quote is contained in quotation marks with the author’s name mentioned in the same sentence. Here’s how it would look like:
Mass communication is perhaps best defined by McLuhan in his famous statement “The medium is the message” (83).
This leads the reader to look up McLuhan in your bibliography and get full information on the book or material you are citing.
Chicago: This is more of a publishing style guide than a citation format, as it allows you to use APA or MLA referencing and footnote and citation styles. It does have rules on whether or not to include a Bibliography, which defines how you should write your inline citations. It’s a very flexible format and is ideal for non-academic works such as reaction papers and personal essays.
Turabian: For the most part, this style is similar to Chicago except that it’s designed specifically for student papers. One key difference between Turabian and the APA/MLA style is that it prefers footnotes and endnotes instead of inline citations. It is often used in introductory research classes and is preferred in music, art history, theology, and women’s studies.
