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. Most importantly, citations give credit to the authors of quoted or consulted information. Failure to acknowledge sources of information properly may constitute plagiarism. For an explicit definition of plagiarism, see the Boston University Academic Conduct Code.
For detailed instructions on how to cite within the text of your paper, please consult a style manual listed below. Please also note: some of the resources below do not cover every possibility you might encounter when trying to cite your sources. For this reason, it is suggested that you consult a style manual to create your bibliography.
BU Librarians often recommend 
RefWorks as the best tool to manage citations. Accounts are free for the BU community, and most importantly RefWorks can automatically create a bibliography in hundreds of styles. There are other such tools.
General Citation Guides and Tools
Guides to formatting citations, usually slightly less detailed but more user-friendly that the official stylebook.
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Citing Sources Within Your Paper (Duke University) Duke University is responsible for this well-organized site about citing in the body of your text.
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Sources and Citation (Dartmouth College) This great resource from Dartmouth College is clear and easy-to-use.
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Documentation Styles (Simmons College) Simmons College has produced this guide that includes MLA, APA, AMA, ASA, CSE, and Chicago styles.
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Citation Guide (Harvard Business School) This excellent guide in .PDF from the Harvard Business School covers citation within text as well as how to do a bibliography using Chicago style.
Tools to quickly format a citation. Always double-check the results for accuracy.
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Citation Machine A site designed to help create bibliographies easily, this was developed by David Warlick & The Landmark Project.
Citing Sources
Why cite?
1. to recognize and credit an author’s work and ideas.
2. to enable the reader of your paper to find the article (or book, etc.) and read it.
3. to avoid possible copyright and plagiarism problems.
Avoiding plagiarism - University of Arizona Libraries
MLA (Modern Language Association) Style
MLA Handbook by Location: Mugar Reference LB2369 G5Publication Date: 2016Note: access to the companion material at http://www.mlahandbook.org/ is available to individuals who have purchased the Handbook, but not to institutions.
MLA style is widely used by universities, academic presses, and in the humanities subject areas. The association makes some information available through the style section on its site at https://style.mla.org/. Be sure to look through the list of Frequently Asked Questions on their site to get the most pertinent example citations. The 8th edition is the most recent, published in 2016.
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