Citing Your Sources
Proper citation is an essential aspect of scholarship. Citing properly allows your reader or audience to locate the materials you have used. Citations give credit to the authors of quoted or consulted information.
For detailed instructions on how to cite within the text of your paper, please consult a style manual linked below.
BU Librarians recommend 
RefWorks as a tool to manage citations. Accounts are free for the BU community, and most importantly RefWorks can automatically create a bibliography in hundreds of styles.
Here are some easy web options.
Research Guide: Create Bibliographies
Chicago Style Online
Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide
Chicago-style source citations come in two varieties:
Notes and bibliography and Author-date.
The Notes and Bibliography system is preferred by many working in the humanities—including literature, history, and the arts. In this system, sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes. Each note corresponds to a raised (superscript) number in the text. Sources are also usually listed in a separate bibliography. The notes and bibliography system can accommodate a wide variety of sources, including unusual ones that don’t fit neatly into the author-date system.
The Author-Date system is more common in the sciences and social sciences. In this system, sources are briefly cited in the text, usually in parentheses, by author’s last name and year of publication. Each in-text citation matches up with an entry in a reference list, where full bibliographic information is provided.
MLA (Modern Language Association) Style
MLA Handbook by
The Modern Language Association, the authority on research and writing, takes a fresh look at documenting sources in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. Works are published today in a dizzying range of formats. A book, for example, may be read in print, online, or as an e-book--or perhaps listened to in an audio version. On the Web, modes of publication are regularly invented, combined, and modified. Previous editions of the MLA Handbook provided separate instructions for each format, and additional instructions were required for new formats. In this groundbreaking new edition of its best-selling handbook, the MLA recommends instead one universal set of guidelines, which writers can apply to any type of source. Shorter and redesigned for easy use, the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook guides writers through the principles behind evaluating sources for their research. It then shows them how to cite sources in their writing and create useful entries for the works-cited list. More than just a new edition, this is a new MLA style.
Location: Mugar Reference LB2369 G53Publication Date: 8th edition 2016
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