Research Tips and Tricks

Provide citations whenever you use someone else’s words or ideas. Your citations may take many forms, and the style of your citations depends on your discipline. The UNK Library provides research guides that have information on the APA, ASA, Chicago/Turabian, and MLA citation styles, as well as how to cite government documents. Find these guides linked on the left-hand side of this page.

Citations usually appear in two places: in the text of a paper or in footnotes and in a bibliography. A bibliography is the list of full citations found at the end of an article. In-text and full citations look very different.

Citations contain the information necessary for readers of a paper to locate the sources used. You can use the bibliographies of the journal articles you read to find more sources to use in your own paper—just make sure you read those cited sources instead of parroting what the article you’re reading has to say about them!

Remember, to avoid plagiarism, your citations must be present, complete, and correct. When in doubt, provide a citation.

The full citations found in a bibliography typically list the author’s name, date of publication, title of the resource, title of the container in which the resource can be found, if applicable, and publication information. A container here can refer to a journal title if you’re using a journal article or the title of a book when citing a book chapter. Different types of sources require differently formatted citations. For example, a book citation looks different from a film citation regardless of the citation style used.

In-text citations often include the author’s last name, year of publication, and page number, if applicable. Paraphrases and quotations generally require a page number; summaries do not, but summaries do still need to be cited.