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In the previous video in this series you learned why it's important to cite your information
sources: to support your own ideas and conclusions with the ideas and quotations of experts,
to allow your audience to easily follow up on the sources you used, and to simply be
clear with your audience about which ideas are yours and which ideas were pulled from
another author, thereby avoiding plagiarism. This video will focus on the formatting of
your References list citations. Formatting citations according to a specific style may
seem unnecessarily complicated or may feel like busy work to some of us. So why exactly
do citations need to be formatted in a specific way? Well, it comes down to issues of clarity
and ease of use. Imagine how confusing it would be if every time you sat down to use
a computer the letters on the keyboard were all in a different order. It's because the
letters are in the same format no matter which computer you're using, you can quickly go
about your typing. Citations have common formats for that same reason. Researchers, authors
and students want to quickly understand what each part of the citation means so they can
quickly and accurately understand where are the authors' names and the date it was written
or produced, as well as being able to locate the source if they want to see it themselves.
Learning how these standard styles work will make it easier for your audience to locate
the sources you used, and will make it easier for you to locate sources from another author's
bibliography as you go about your own research. Another common question is why we need to
learn formatting when there are utilities such as Son of Citation Machine and the references
tab in Microsoft Word that create citations for you. This is similar to understanding
basic math concepts before using a calculator. You won't know how to use a calculator effectively
or know which numbers to put with which operators and in what order without understanding the
basics first. So use whatever tool will help you create citations more easily, but always
check the work of the computer program with your human knowledge of correct formatting.
The first step, whether you create the citation yourself or get the help of a utility, is
to determine the type of resource you are citing. Some common types are book, chapter
from a book (also called chapter in an anthology), online book, article or article with DOI number
(don't worry too much about the distinction between these two types. The DOI number is
a document ID number you might see on articles found online or in databases. If you see the
number include it, if you don't then don't worry about it.) Other types are newspaper
article, online video, blog post, and personal communication such as an email or an interview you
you conducted. You'll notice that "website" is not a category by itself. If the information
you found is online, you want to determine if you're looking at an online book, an online
article, or some other type of document. This will get you to the right format for citing
that resource. To get started let's look in detail at the format for citing a book in
APA format. The pattern is literal and precise. So when you see a period you put a period.
When you see a capital letter you put a capital letter. And so on. When creating citations
in APA style you start with the author's last name capitalized, comma, the author's first
initial, then a period, and middle initial and period if given. This punctuation is included
to clearly indicate to your reader which part of the citation is the author's name, which
is the title, which is the publisher, et cetera. Next is the date it was published, inside
parentheses, and followed by a period. Then continue to follow the rest of the pattern
to include the title and the publisher information, following capitalization and punctuation closely.
Notice that APA differs from many styles in using sentence capitalization, capitalizing
only the first word of a title and proper nouns. This is how a citation is created,
by closely following the pattern for the type of source you need to cite. An example of
another common citation is that for a magazine or journal article. Take a look at this pattern
for an APA style citation of an article. Now look at this citation. Which part is the name
of the article? Which part is the name of the source or journal title? The information
is all here and readily available once you can decipher the pattern format. Library subscription
databases have an extremely helpful feature too. They create a citation for you, that
you can copy and paste into your own References document. When you find an article you want
to use, look for a button that says "Cite" or "Citation" and be sure to select the APA
format before copy and pasting. You may have noticed that in each of these examples the
citations are in a sort of reverse paragraph, with the *first line flush with the margin
and the rest of the lines indented. This is the proper way to format the citations on
your References page. It's called a "hanging indent" and it's a format built into Microsoft
Word. You simply highlight your citations, then click on the small arrow right next to
the word Paragraph on the home tab. A dialog box will open and you'll choose "hanging
indent" under the "special" section, and click OK. Once you've done that, just be sure that the citations
are double-spaced and that they're in alphabetical order according to the first word of each
citation. It should look something like this. The library website has a handout if you want
to see these steps again. A few last suggestions: Your first step is always to figure out what
type of resource you're citing.
As soon as you start finding resources for your project, create a document where
you can copy and paste citations. This will make your work much easier, and will ensure
that you have all the information you need to cite your source. If you use a utility
such as Son of Citation Machine, Microsoft Word, or a library database to create your
citation, always double check it against your style guide. Remember that your instructor,
the campus writing centers and the library reference desk are great resources for help
in creating citations.