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Writing & Citing: Citation advice

Other sites with good advice

Major components of a citation

No matter what style you're using, the main thing your citation needs to do is help your reader find the source you used.

Citations of particular materials (i.e., books, journals, websites) are easily recognizable by the content that they require. When writing citations from scratch, be sure to include the following general components.

Books:
  • Title
  • Author(s)
  • Publisher
  • Publication Place
  • Year

Journal articles:
  • Title of article
  • Title of journal
  • Article author(s)
  • Volume
  • Issue
  • Year
  • Page numbers

Websites:
  • Website author (a person or an organization)
  • Title of website
  • Web address
  • Date of last revision
  • Date that site was accessed

 

The Purdue OWL site has information on annotated bibliographies. The Reference Managers tab offers several different computer software programs to help you prepare your bibliography.

Understanding Citations Tutorial

For an illustrated tutorial on how to decipher, and thus build, citations using the essential components, watch this:

Screenshot of Understanding Citations Tutorial, with link to mp4

Citations deconstructed