Credible, thorough academic work requires its author(s) to provide information on the research they did. Citation styles are simply tools for putting that information into a clear, consistent format, so that readers are able to quickly grasp the provenance of ideas, facts, statistics, and so on, and to locate the sources for themselves.
All citations answer this question: Can your reader find the resources you used, in the form that you saw them? The last phrase in that sentence is important, because alternate or updated editions of the same material can have significant differences. Additionally, when information is digital or ephemeral (or both), a resource can be changed without a clear indication of that change, or even deleted.
The most common citation styles for scholarship in business and economics are the APA, MLA, and University of Chicago styles; short, basic guides to these formats follow. Some professors and publications supplement Chicago with the style rules of the Journal of Economic Literature. Your professors will likely indicate which style to use.
Prefer to learn by watching?
Go to our YouTube channel and take a look at our video workshops, APA 7th and MLA 8th, as well as Locating Citations in Pace Databases and Getting APA Citations from Google Scholar.
When should you use APA citation style?
APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences, also including most hard sciences, psychology, sociology, and related disciplines.
What does APA style entail?
APA employs in-text citations and a references list. APA in-text citations ask you to include the year of publication as well as the author's last name and the page number of the source that you are using.
What does an in-text citation typically look like?
If you are directly quoting from a work, include the author, year of publication, and the page number for the reference (preceded by "p."). Introduce the quotation with a signal phrase that includes the author's last name followed by the date of publication in parentheses.
According to Jones (1998), "Students often had difficulty using APA style, especially when it was their first time" (p. 199).
Jones (1998) found "students often had difficulty using APA style" (p. 199); what implications does this have for teachers?
If the author is not named in a signal phrase, place the author's last name, the year of publication, and the page number in parentheses after the quotation.
She stated, "Students often had difficulty using APA style" (Jones, 1998, p. 199), but she did not offer an explanation as to why.*
What does a work-cited citation typically look like?
Your reference list should appear at the end of your paper. It provides the information necessary for a reader to locate and retrieve any source you cite in the body of the paper. Each source you cite in the paper must appear in your reference list; likewise, each entry in the reference list must be cited in your text.
Your references should begin on a new page separate from the text of the essay; label this page "References" centered at the top of the page (do NOT bold, underline, or use quotation marks for the title). All text should be double-spaced just like the rest of your essay.
The format for an entry in your works-cited list in APA will more or less follow this guideline:
Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Location: Publisher.
Citation Style Guides:
The Purdue OWL is an amazing resource that provides great illustrations of how to cite different materials. The structure of your citations will change depending on the format of the work that you are using; for example, citing a book is slightly different than citing an article.
The Purdue OWL guide for APA includes specific information and examples, as well as a sample paper formatted in APA style.
For more information, check out our citing sources guide.
When should you use MLA citation style?
MLA is most commonly used to cite sources within in the liberal arts, specifically the humanities.
What does MLA style entail?
When you cite in MLA, you'll use parenthetical citations for your in-text citations with the author and page number--MLA does not require the year of the source--and you'll also include a works-cited page at the end of your paper.
What does an in-text citation typically look like?
What does a work-cited citation typically look like?
Your works-cited page and your in-text citations should line up with each other, meaning that if you include an in-text citation, you will be able to find more detailed information about that source in the complete works-cited list.
For example, the in-text citation might read, "(Wordsworth, 263)" -- indicating the author's last name and the page used in the paper.
The works-cited citation for that book could be:
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London: Oxford UP, 1967.
What is the general rule for a works-cited citation?
The format for a citation in your works-cited list in MLA will more or less follow this guideline:
Author Last Name, Author First Name. Title of Book. Publisher Location: Name of Publisher, Year of Publication.
Citation Style Guides
The Purdue OWL: MLA Formatting and Style Guide is a wonderful resource that breaks down how to cite different formats in MLA.
For more information, check out our citing sources guide.
When should you use CMS/Chicago citation style?
CMS, or Chicago, is commonly used to cite sources within the humanities and in popular nonfiction.
What does CMS style entail?
CMS offers the choice of two styles of documentation: the Author-Date style, which uses parenthetical in-text citations and a full works-cited page, and the Notes-Bibliography (NB) style, which uses superscripted numbers to indicate footnotes or endnotes and a works-cited page.
What does an NB in-text citation typically look like?
A citation is indicated by a number, superscripted and in a smaller font, that corresponds with a note (footnote or endnote) containing a brief citation.
The note itself is styled as an author's name and the work's title, plus the page number of the cited material. If the work's title is lengthy, a shortened version (four or fewer words) can be used to identify it.
What does an NB works-cited citation look like?
The format for a citation in your works-cited list in Chicago will more or less follow this guideline:
LastName, FirstName. Title of the Book. Publisher Location: Name of Publisher, Year of Publication.
What does an Author-Date in-text citation typically look like?
The citation appears in parentheses after the quoted or paraphrased text.
What does a works-cited citation look like in CMS style?
For both the Author-Date and NB styles, the format for a citation in your works-cited list will more or less follow this guideline:
LastName, FirstName. Title of the Book. Publisher Location: Name of Publisher, Year of Publication.
The citations for the previous examples would therefore look like this:
Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012.
Elaine Auyoung. When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Citation Style Guides
For more information, check out our citing sources guide.
