Citation Guides

How these citation guides work

Each guide answers one question completely. It opens with the short answer, then shows worked examples for the common source types, then covers the edge cases that cost students points: a source with no author, no page numbers, three or more authors, or a quotation found inside another source.

The examples use real, well-known publications and are formatted with the same engine that powers our citation generators, so the guide and the tool never disagree. Where a style leaves a choice to your instructor, the guide says so instead of pretending there is one right answer.

When you are ready to cite your own sources, every guide links to the matching tool. The MLA Citation Maker and the APA Citation Machine turn a link, DOI, ISBN or title into a finished entry you can copy or download for Word.

Citation guides by style

MLA style is the default in high school English, first-year composition and most humanities courses. It pairs short author-page citations in your sentences, such as (Morrison 45), with an alphabetical Works Cited page at the end. The MLA guides cover both halves, plus annotated bibliographies, which many instructors assign before a research paper.

APA style is used in psychology, education, nursing and most social sciences. Beyond citations, APA sets rules for tables and figures, which is where many lab reports and research papers lose marks. The APA table guide walks through the number, title, body and notes, with templates you can copy.

The citation generators cover Chicago, Turabian, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, ASA, ACS, CSE and AMA; find them all on the citation machines page.

Paper format and writing guides

Citations are only part of a graded paper. The format guides cover the rest of the page: the four-line MLA heading and the running header with your last name and page number, APA 7 margins, fonts, heading levels and the student title page, and the Turabian layout many history and religion departments require, including footnotes and the bibliography page.

The writing guides teach the analysis behind the essay. The rhetorical analysis guide explains ethos, pathos, logos and kairos, walks through a full example built on a famous presidential speech, and shows how the AP English Language essay is scored, so you analyze how a text persuades instead of summarizing what it says.

What every citation needs, in any style

Styles differ in punctuation and order, but they ask for the same core facts about a source. Collect these while you research and the formatting becomes the easy part.

• Who created it: the author, editor, organization or channel.
• What it is called: the title of the article, chapter, page or video, and the title of the larger work it sits in (the journal, website or book).
• When it was published, and for web pages that change, when you accessed it.
• Where to find it: the publisher, volume and issue, page range, DOI or URL.
• Which part you used: the page number, paragraph number or timestamp, for the citation in your sentence.

Citations in your sentences and the list at the end

Every academic style works in two places. In your sentences, a short citation points to a source; at the end of the paper, a full entry tells the reader how to find it. The two must match: every source you cite in the text appears in the list, and every entry in the list is cited at least once.

In MLA and APA, the short citation uses the author's name, so the list is alphabetical. Numbered styles such as IEEE and Vancouver use [1] or a superscript number instead, and the list follows the order you first cite each source. Mixing the two systems in one paper is one of the most common errors instructors flag.

If you change the order of a numbered list or rename an author in an author-date list, update both places. A saved list in a citation generator makes this easier: correct the source once and the entry updates everywhere you copy it from.

Common citation mistakes these guides help you avoid

• Citing a website by its URL alone, with no author, title or site name.
• Using the date you accessed a page as its publication date.
• Putting a page number for a source that has none, or leaving one out for a book or article that has them.
• Formatting the list with a regular indent instead of a hanging indent.
• Sorting a Works Cited page by title when the entries start with authors.
• Copying a citation from a database without checking the capitalization and the author names.

Using the guides with the free tools

Read the guide once to understand the pattern, then let a tool do the repetitive work. Paste a source into the MLA Citation Maker, check the details it finds against the guide's checklist, and add the entry to a saved list. When your paper is finished, sort the list with the Alphabetizer, check your length with the Word Counter, and download the list for Word.

For the parts of a paper that are not citations, the APA Title Page Generator and the MLA Title Page Generator lay out the first page for you.

Who writes these guides

The guides are written and maintained by The Study Corp editorial team, which also builds the free citation tools on this site. Each guide is checked against the published style rules before it goes live, and the date at the bottom of each guide shows when it was last reviewed.

If you spot an error or a rule that has changed, the fix goes into both the guide and the tool, so students using either one get the same answer.