Academic writing relies heavily on the understanding and the use of other authors’ideas. Students must often draw arguments, evidence, concepts, and theories from other sources to support their own argumentation. Like all academic writers, they are required to give credit for the information they have used by providing proper references.
Anything that is borrowed from another author must be referenced, including but not limited to:
·a direct quotation, summary or paraphrase,
·another author’s idea, concept, theory, chart, image, etc.
·information that is not “common knowledge”.
As to the basic rules of referencing, remember the following.
·References must provide readers with the information they need to find the sources used.
·Referencing styles vary according to discipline.
·Referencing must always be done according to the professor’s requirements.
All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. Three commonly used styles are introduced in this section, namely APA, MLA and Chicago(CMS).
MLA Style
The Modern Language Association (MLA) has been for decades one of the leading developers in the humanities academia.
MLA style referencing uses parenthetical in-text citations to refer to an alphabetical list of Works Cited at the end of the paper. Generally, MLA style is used in the humanities, particularly in literature studies.
An in-text citation names the author of the source, often in a signal phrase, and gives a page number in parentheses. At the end of the paper, a list of works cited provides publication information about the source; the list is alphabetized by authors’ last names (or by titles for works without authors).
APA Style
The style of the American Psychological Association (APA) is primarily used in scientific literary works. They, like the MLA produce guidelines that dictate the accepted norms for basic and advanced literary work. The majority of the work done in the APA style has to do with the disciplines of the sciences, social sciences and mathematics. The APA has developed their own style of documentation that is very different than that of the MLA or the Chicago Press.