Citations

Citations can be confusing. There are many different citation styles and not many concrete rules about when to use a particular style. Your professor may indicate which citation style you should use. Generally, certain citation styles correspond with certain fields of study, though sometimes specific areas within a discipline or field will choose differently—linguistics, commonly grouped with English departments, for instance, will often use APA, despite most English literature and rhetoric journals using MLA or Chicago styles. Table 12.3 provides some general guidelines for correlation between citation styles and disciplines.

The formatting of these citation styles is not arbitrary; each format reflects the values and priorities of their corresponding fields. For example, the year of publication is emphasized much more heavily in APA because that indicates how current the research is. For instance, research on treating cancer from the 1970s may not hold up today. MLA, by contrast, does not emphasize the year, because this is not as important a concern as the text’s title for fields like literature. The final arbiter of the citation style to use is the target audience: check with your professor or your intended publisher.

However, just knowing what citation style is used doesn’t always clear up the confusion. Each different form of information is cited differently. The most common forms that you will encounter are books, chapters in books, journal articles, and websites.

Take a look at the citations on the following pages. You can see that there are differences between citation styles. You can also see that each information format contains different elements. When you try to determine whether a citation is for a book, book chapter, or journal, think about the elements inherent in each of these formats. For example, a journal article appears in a journal that is published in a volume and issue. If you see volume and issue numbers in the citation, you can assume that the citation is for a journal article. A book chapter in a volume of collected essays is usually written by a different author from the editors of the whole book. Finally, a single-authored book is often the easiest citation to decipher because it contains the fewest elements.