Research: WR153: All Poetry is Political (Spring 2024): Citing Your Sources

Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab)

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects.

Turabian

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations:
Chicago Style for students and researchers.
9th edition, 2018
by Kate L. Turabian

Citing your Sources

Proper citation is an important aspect of scholarship. Citing properly allows your reader 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 your sources please consult a style guides listed below. Although these guides do not cover every possibility you might encounter when trying to cite your sources, a style guide can help you create your bibliography.

BU Librarians often recommend RefWorks as the best tool to manage citations. Accounts are free for the BU community. RefWorks can automatically create your bibliography in hundreds of styles.

Here are some easy web options and more on Creating Bibliographies.

MLA (Modern Language Association) Style

Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) MLA Style Introduction

MLA Handbook by The Modern Language Association of America 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 G53
Publication Date: 8th edition 2016

Chicago Style

Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Staff (Editor) Originally written in 1906, this tome has a rich history of providing quality guidelines for citing works and creating bibliographies. The library has a subscription to the full online version. The website also offers a citation quick guide that has many examples. The 17th edition is the most recent, published in 2017.
Location: Mugar Reference Z253 U69