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IR 510 Comparative Race and Migration

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.

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 recommend refworks 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.

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.

Turabian

MLA (Modern Language Association) Style