To cite properly, follow the rules of your department or field first. Where there are none, introduce an important source by the author's name and the title of the work the first time you cite it, shorten later mentions, set long quotes apart from your text, and choose between in-text citations, footnotes, and endnotes.
Avoiding plagiarism, that is, presenting other people's work as your own in a paper, is a big step. (If you need a refresher, read how to avoid plagiarism.) But citing the work you use properly is just as important: the work your research builds on, the theories you contradict, and the sources your own work is rooted in. This article explains how.
Citations
Citation rules vary between research fields, university departments, and disciplines. If you are writing a term paper or a thesis, it's best to get clear instructions from your department, teacher, or supervisor. Many universities offer courses, or at least single lectures, on citations. If yours does, attend them. Learning how to cite properly will spare you a lot of pain, confusion, and unfounded accusations during your academic career.
When there are no requirements for your subject or discipline, though, you still have to choose a proper way to cite other people's work. Here are some hints.
In-text citations
The first step is to decide how to cite the author of the quote or the idea you are using or referring to.
Is it an important quote, word for word? Is it crucial for your findings or for the rest of your paper? Then introduce the author and the work to your audience in a sentence of its own.
Is the quote one of many in a list, or does it only make a minor point? Is the work cited only for completeness, and not crucial to your own research? Then a quick mention in parentheses, or even a footnote, will do.
When you cite another author's work for the first time, mention their name, the title of their work, and the medium (was it a book, an article, or a website?). If their work was crucial for your own findings, you can even spend a sentence or more introducing it, with a short summary of its content and of why it matters for your work.
Later mentions, even with other works cited in between, can use just the author's last name, plus the year of publication if you cite more than one work by the same author.
Two examples:
- In her book Women, Men and Language, Jennifer Coates discusses the idea that men and women belong to different subcultures and therefore follow different conversational rules.
- Charles Darwin closes On the Origin of Species with a paragraph that begins "There is grandeur in this view of life."
Direct and indirect quotes
There are two ways to cite: you quote an author directly, in quotation marks, or you refer to or summarize what they said. Which one you choose depends on the content you cite and how relevant it is to your text.
If you cannot put an author's words better yourself, or you want to quote a whole relevant paragraph, use a direct quote.
Minor points, or summaries of findings, research subjects, and the like, can be mentioned without quotation marks.
Always set long direct quotes apart from the rest of your text, by changing the font, the indentation, or the line spacing. A quote that spans several lines should not begin and end with quotation marks: the change in layout is enough to show that it is a quote. For the marks themselves, see the secret of quotation marks.
Citations in footnotes
Citations do not always have to appear in your text. In many disciplines, such as literary studies, footnotes are a common way to cite your quotes. A footnote is a short note at the bottom of the page, separated from the rest of the text. Footnotes usually hold comments and additional information that would interrupt the flow of the text, or that is not relevant enough to include in it. They are also a proper place for a citation.
As with in-text citations, the first mention of an author and a work should be detailed: the author's name, the title of the work, and perhaps the medium and the year of publication.
Later mentions of the same source can be shortened, for example to the last name and the year.
Most word processors handle footnotes very well. You insert one in your text, and it appears at the bottom of the page. If you add text before it, and the sentence it belongs to moves to another page, the footnote moves with it.
You can place a footnote anywhere in a sentence, but it is best to put it at the end of the sentence that contains the quote, so it does not distract the reader.
Endnotes
Another way to keep citations out of your text is an endnote. Like footnotes, endnotes leave small numbers in the text that point to the note for that sentence. Instead of appearing at the bottom of each page, though, all the notes appear at the end of your text.
As you can imagine, it is a bit of a nuisance for readers to go back and forth between the page they are reading and the list of endnotes. For that reason, endnotes work best in shorter texts, where the notes are never far away.
In most styles, you also list every source you cited at the end of your paper: see what a bibliography is and why you need one.