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Citation Style Guide

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Why Cite?

  • Citations let your professor, or anyone else who reads your work, find the items you used in your research. The key to a successful citation is providing all the information needed for your reader to find the book, article, or other item you are citing.
  • Citing builds your credibility and shows that your ideas are shared by other experts in the field. Citing scholarly, peer-reviewed sources lends extra credibility to your work.
  • Citation avoids plagiarism! Citing your sources properly gives credit to the original author. 

Citation Styles

Citation Styles:

The main styles used at AU are listed below.  If you need to use another style click here. Those with large research projects should strongly consider a citation manager such as Zotero. Students can use citation generators like BibMe, Citation Machine, EasyBib (note that all of these tools have a lot of video banner ads that automatically play) or CitationGenerator (this does not have ads)  but you must ALWAYS check your citations using the resources below:

  • Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford has excellent guides and sample citations/papers for MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian Styles.

APA (American Psychological Association) - used in the social sciences

Chicago Manual of Style - used in the humanities and social sciences

MLA (Modern Language Association) - used in literature and the humanities

Turabian Style - a variation of the Chicago style used in many disciplines in humanities, social sciences and natural sciences​