Citing Sources in MLA & APA
Photo credit: https://twitter.com/CWC_Meramec/status/720297603066245124
One of the many reasons I love Shia LaBeouf is because he is a living testament to why you should cite your sources. Not only does he plagiarize the films he directs, but he plagiarizes his apologies for plagiarizing. A few of the people he's ripped off: Mark Zuckerberg, Kanye West, Tiger Woods, a French soccer player, and some random person on Yahoo! Answers.
Don't be Shia LaBeouf.
Citing your sources can be inconvenient and confusing, but it's a necessary part of writing a paper. Plagiarism will get you an automatic zero...
Original GIF credit: https://media4.giphy.com/media/UYEsYiuOCr3Og/200_s.gif, edited at ezgif.com
And yes, they check.
Lucky for you, technology has made it easier than ever to cite your sources in MLA or APA or whatever obscure system you want to use; Microsoft Word can literally do it for you (I'll explain how in a bit). Even so, technology isn't always dependable and you'll need to know how to do this for yourself when the zombie apocalypse takes down the power grid. If you don't scribble in text citations into your survivor's journal, nobody's going to take you seriously, and we don't want that.
I'll take you through the process. Since I've already talked about evaluating sources, I'll assume you already have everything you need, so we'll skip the gathering information step and get straight to the juicy stuff--formatting the citation and using it in the text.
Formatting
Even though you don't see the entire written citation until the last page, I always do this part first, for reasons I'll explain in a bit. For now just assume that I am a magic writing wizard whose word is to be trusted. (According to a meme, my wizard name is Twinkle Merlinus, and I wear that name with pride.) I'll start with MLA (usually used in English and the humanities), then move on to APA (used in the sciences, especially social sciences like psychology and sociology). For a super helpful chart comparing and contrasting various aspects of the two, go here. If you're not sure which one you're supposed to use, ask your teacher.
Purdue OWL is great for knowing what information you need and what order it needs to go in, so I suggest starting there. They go way more in depth with all sorts of scenarios like what to do if there are multiple authors, different editions, other contributors besides the author, or if the source is something weird like a TV show. I'll just give you a basic idea of what you're looking at.
MLA
For a book:
Author Last Name, First Name. Book Title. Publisher, Publication date.
West, Kanye. How Not to Rap: A Step-by-Step Guide. Random House, 2016.
For a website:
Author Last Name, First Name. "Article or Page Title." Website Title, Publisher or Sponsor, Publication date, URL. Accessed [date accessed].
Meyer, Stephenie. "Vampires Are Shiny Now Because I Said So." Twilight Conspiracy, Harvard University, March 2016, www.harvard.edu/meyer/twilight/because-i-said-so.html. Accessed November 10, 2016.
Note: If you're citing the entire website and not an article, then just leave the article/page title out.
For a periodical (journal, newspaper, or magazine article):
Author Last Name, First Name. "Article Title." Periodical Title, Day Month Year, pp. [pages used].
Mercury, Freddie. "Bohemian Rhapsody is Actually, Like, Super Depressing." New York Times, 17 March 2016, p. A1.
Note: Use pp. before the page number if you're citing a journal article, but p. if you're citing a newspaper or magazine article.
Cool! You got through MLA. Have a dancing BMO as a reward.
APA
Three big differences between MLA and APA: 1) Instead of using the first name of the author, you use the first and middle initials; 2) only capitalize the first word of the article instead of every word; and 3) don't put article title in quotation marks.
Note: If you can't find a date, put n.d. in the parenthesis. Don't just leave it blank.
For a book:
Author Last Name, F. I. (Year of Publication). Book title thing: Capitalize after a colon, too. Location: Publisher.
Squarepants, S. B. (2008). Home renovations: Turning a pineapple into a palace. Bikini Bottom: Simon & Schuster.
For a website:
Author Last Name, F. I. (Year, Month Day). Article title. Website Title. Retrieved from URL.
LaBeouf, S. (2015, May 8). It's not plagiarism, it's an artistic choice. Potato Blog. Retrieved from www.potatoblog.com/labeouf/it's-totally-plagiarism.html
For a periodical:
Author Last Name, F. I. (Year, Month Day). Article title. Periodical Title, volume # (issue #), [pages used]. Retrieved from URL [if accessed online].
Wall, E. (2014, June). How to grow plants in a shoe in a toxic environment. Time, 143, 28-32. Retrieved from www.time.com/environment/2014/june/plants-in-shoes.html.
Note: Journal articles have a special identifying number attached to them called the doi. If you can find the doi, put it at the end of the citation instead of the URL:
Author Last Name, F.I. (Year). Article title. Periodical Title, volume # (issue #), [pages used]. doi: ####.
Stitch, S. (2016). Fat vs. fluffy debate among modern aliens. Journal of Psychology, 27 (3), 18-27. doi: 10.742/2018-3724.9830384.x.
These are just basic setups that use the most common information included in citations, but depending on what source you use, you may have to include other things, as well--edition, volume, version, translator, etc. Double check with OWL or the MLA style guide to make sure your citations are correct.
The OWL knows all.
In-Text Citations
Okay, you have your citations written up. Congrats! You've already got Shia LaBeouf beat. (Because it is a competition, and Shia LaBeouf cannot be allowed to conquer.) Now you have to actually refer to them in the body of your paper. Ruh-roh, Raggy.
There are a few different ways you can use information. Direct quotes and paraphrasing are at the top of that list. If you're using the source's words exactly, you're quoting them, so you have to put the words in quotation marks. If you're putting their information in your own words, you're paraphrasing, so you don't need to use quotations. Any way you cut it, though, you've gotta say where the information came from, and that's where in-text citations come into play.
Whether you're using MLA or APA, the first component is going to be saying the source. Try to say this part in the sentence itself instead of in parenthesis. The source is usually the author, but can include other information as well. If the source doesn't have an author listed, then try to provide as much detail as possible instead, like the article title and website. Use the source to introduce the information.
Some examples:
In How to Make Everyone Love You For Being Morbid, Tim Burton discusses the benefits of being psychologically unbalanced--namely, making lots and lots of money off of movies.
The National Institute of People Who Aren't Famous Anymore has an entire website dedicated to Shia LaBeouf called Shia LaBest, which states on the homepage, "Shia has reached a degree of crazy that 1 in 4 clown college dropouts say they aspire to emulate."
Just saying the source isn't enough, though. There are additional items you need to include, which vary whether it's MLA or APA.
MLA
In MLA, you also include the page number in the text. This goes in parenthesis at the end of the sentence (or if you're using the information for an entire paragraph, at the end of the paragraph). This unit--the citation and the parenthesis--is called a parenthetical. Notice: the period comes after the parenthetical. If there is a direct quote, the parenthetical comes after the final quotation mark.
Matt Smith confirmed that the show Doctor Who is "older than the pyramids" (17).
You can also forego mentioning the author in the sentence and instead put that in the parenthesis with the page number. Teachers usually prefer you don't do this very often, but it's an option.
Nearly three quarters of human beings would rather be pandas (McDonald 24).
If there is no author listed, you can put the article title in parenthesis instead. If you're using an electronic source like a website that doesn't have pages, you can just leave the numbers out.
For longer quotations (more than four lines), start the quote on a new line with no quotation marks. Introduce it in the sentence before, and include a parenthetical at the end of the quote.
Kanye West examined the roll of music in modern society:
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah I don't even listen to myself (243).
For other scenarios--multiple citations in one parenthetical, multiple sources by the same person, books that have more than one version or edition--check out OWL.
APA
In APA, you have to include the year in addition to the author and page numbers. The year always goes in parenthesis right after the author's name whether or not you use the author's name in the sentence. For direct quotations, the parenthetical goes right after the end of the quote instead of at the end of the sentence.
King Arthur (499) developed a fool-proof method of removing swords from improbable locations (p. 72).
Science is "totally dope" (Nye, 2016, p. 47), which is why many choose to study it.
If you're citing ideas from an entire book or article, you can leave the page numbers out. Saying something like "Freud had lots of theories for dreams" might be hard to pin down to a few pages. You can also leave out the page numbers if you're paraphrasing an idea instead of quoting the author, though most people encourage using them anyway.
Current research indicates that someday lizards will be the dominant species on Earth and we should just get comfortable with that (Connors, 2012).
Just like in MLA, you can reference the article title if there is no author listed.
Supernatural is kind of a messed up show ("Most Messed Up Shows", 2016, p. 4).
For longer quotations (40 words or more), make a sentence to introduce it, then create a block paragraph indented from the left margin (where you would start a new paragraph). The parenthetical goes at the end.
[Blah blah blah there's a whole paragraph in front of this sentence.] Squids aren't the only animals with six legs, however:
Bugs have six legs. I mean most of them do. Some of them do. The ones that don't have eight do. Those are spiders. Or ticks, I guess. Or scorpions. Man, scorpions. Those are scary. Or some of them have, like, a whole bunch, like centipedes or millipedes. Millipedes aren't as scary. Centipedes look like monsters. They've got those big ol' teeth. Talk about creepy (Littlefoot, 2008, p. 2).
For more information about in-text citing in APA, go here.
There is never a bad time for a Home Alone GIF.
Also, now that you have a basic idea about formatting and citing in MLA and APA, I'll refer you back to that chart I talked about earlier, since now you'll be able to understand it more.
Citation Generators
Okay, let's be real. There are about a thousand different places online where you can just type in the name of the article and it'll come up with a citation for you. Bibme is one of the more popular ones, but word processing programs like Microsoft Word and Google Docs often have citation generators as well. I'll go over how to use them in a minute, but first, a word of warning:
Automatic citation generators are often inaccurate. Don't blindly use them without checking their work first. A lot of times they leave out the author's name, date published, and the publisher. Sometimes they put things in the wrong places, so they'll say that the article title is the name of the website, or the author name is the article title. Make sure that all the information is accurate before using the citation is generates.
In Microsoft Word, "Researcher" under the References tab lets you look up articles, read them, and cite them without ever opening a browser. It's easy to figure out how to use it, so I won't go into detail. If you want to enter all of the information pieces manually, you can click on "Manage Sources" and then "New" (still under the References tab). Doing it this way is good if you have the information, but no Internet connection.
Google Docs does not include a built-in citation generator, but there are add-ons available for it. To get one, go to "Add-ons" > "Get add-ons" and search "citations". Several different ones will pop up. Near the top of the list will be EasyBib and Paperpile. Either of these works, but I prefer Paperpile because you don't need to know what kind of source something is (journal article, website, book, etc.) in order to find it.
Although both Word and Docs have an option for inserting in-text citations, these parentheticals are usually wrong. The programs don't know what information you used in the sentence or what pages of the source you used, so they don't know what to put in parenthesis. Whether you use a generator for the bibliography or not, I recommend doing in-text citations by hand.
And yeah. That should just about do it for now. Happy Thanksgiving!
Works Cited:
Purdue OWL. (n.d.). Retrieved November 14, 2016, from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
Stampler, L. (n.d.). A Brief History of Shia LaBeouf Copying the Work of Others. Retrieved November 14, 2016, from http://time.com/6094/shia-labeouf-plagiarism-scandal/
