At East Woods, the format that you will use to cite information sources in your paper is parenthetical reference. You will not be using footnotes, the small numbers that correspond to notes, but rather, your sources will be cited in-text, using names and page numbers inside of parentheses.
Use in-text citations inside your paper whenever you:
- Use information that is not considered common knowledge *
- Summarize information from one of your sources
- Quote directly from one of your sources
(* Use this chart to determine whether or not something is common knowledge)
All sources that are cited in the body of your paper, are then listed in alphabetical order at the end of your paper in a section called Works Cited. If you use other sources for background information, which are considered common knowledge, these sources, regardless of whether they are books, articles, or Web pages are listed alphabetically in a separate section called Works Consulted. Samples of each are below.
The following rules and examples will help you determine how to cite your sources:
1. Usually only the author’s last name and the page number are used inside of parentheses. Don’t use the word “page” or any abbreviation for page. You may place the parenthesis either in the middle of a sentence or at the end. If you put it at the end, the period will follow the parenthesis.
Example: In a recent report on mental disorders, approximately 50% of the patients tested showed some type of abnormal brain activity (Ellington 152).
2. If you are using more than one book by the same author, give the last name, comma, title and page.
Example: Several expressions commonly used today had their beginnings in Elizabethan England, for example, “Neither a borrower, or a lender be.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet 34)
3. If you identify the author in the text, then just give the page number in the parenthesis.
Example: According to Brown, the dimensions of morality are knowledge, feeling and conduct (45).
4. If you use exact words, they must be set off in quotation marks. In the example that follows, a quote from an interview is used. In this case, the year of the interview is in parenthesis; the author of the quote is mentioned in the text.
Example: Clinical psychologist Paul Ginnetty says that the grieving period can be quite long. “From my experience, when death, illness, and injury are caused by man’s inhumanity to man, all bets are off on the normal stages of grief.” (2002)
5. If your quoted material is longer than three lines of text, then indent both margins, single space the quoted text inside of your paper, the rest of which is double-spaced. You also omit the quotation marks and use a smaller font.
Example: The subjects were classified into two groups. Regarding these and other findings,
Block suggests:
Some individuals experience too much anxiety and are thereby
incapacitated. But others do not experience sufficient emotion, and
therefore do not react on the basis of an implicit but culturally shared
set of behavioral premises. Because they operate from a different
premise system, these individuals are more likely to emit behavior
which is inconceivable to the observer (33-34).
6. If you are using information from an online source, do not give page numbers because Web documents usually do not have fixed page numbers. Try to give the name of the person or organization responsible for the page.
Example: The once golden door, as described by poet Emma Lazarus, “had been shut tight in 1924 by federal immigration quotas that reduced the flood of newcomers to a trickle.” (WGBH American Experience)
7. If you are using information from an online database such as Gale Student Resource Center, then give the name of the group, e.g. Gale Research. If you are using more than one article from Gale, then you will need to differentiate between them by giving more information.
Example: “In late 1996, Black English Vernacular, newly labeled Ebonics, was the subject of nationwide debate…” (Worldmark Encyclopedia, Gale Research).
[Then later in the same paper, you use a different article from Gale Student Resource Center],
African Americans entered the political arena for the first time in the late 1860s , (DISCovering US History, Gale Research).
8. For books and articles in magazines, newspapers, and encyclopedia-always try to provide the author if it is known. When the author is not available, use the title and page(s).
Here is an example of a few lines from an original source and various ways of citing them in-text:
Original Source: (this is an actual passage from page 374 of the following book)
Donelson, Kenneth L. and Alleen Pace Nilsen. Literature for Today's Young Adults. New York: Longman, 1997. Print.
“Perhaps almost as important, young adult books before the late 1960s were generally safe, pure and simplistic, devoid of the reality that younger people daily faced. Sports and going to the prom and getting the car for the big Friday night date loomed large as the major problems of young adult life in too many of these novels. Young people read for fun, knowing that they were nothing more than escape reading with little relationship to reality or to anything of significance.”
Here are three different examples of how you could use this paragraph in a paper:
Example #1: In their book on young adult literature, Donelson and Nilsen write that most books written for young adults prior to the late 1960s, were mainly light reading that dealt with the day to day trivialities of life. Most of the subject matter dealt with safe subjects and not with real problems (374).
Example #2: Most of the books that were written for young adults before the end of the 1960s dealt only with safe and simple topics such as dating and cars. The books that young people read at that time didn’t really deal with more of life’s complex problems (Donelson and Nilsen 374).
Example #3: Donelson and Nilsen described the books written for young adults before the late 1960s as “safe, pure, and simplistic, devoid of the reality that younger people daily faced” (374).
Below are several paragraphs from a sample paper on in-text citation. The body of the paper is followed by the sources used. Those sources mentioned in the text are included in the Works Cited section, which follows and other sources that were used for background information are listed in the Works Consulted section.
In-text citation, also known as parenthetical reference, is “the newly recognized format for acknowledging borrowed information within your original text. No longer are footnotes used, unless you need to clarify or add some information. This format is actually easier than footnoting” (Springfield Township Research Paper Guide). The Modern Language Association (2009) has established the revised format for citing all types of sources and is universally recognized as the method used in most schools.
When reading a paper using in-text citations, the reader can immediately identify the source of information or a quote without having to flip to a back page interrupting the flow of a paper (Valenza). When you are using the exact ideas or words of someone else, you put the person’s name in parentheses near the quote, either at the beginning, middle or end. You also include the page number if you are using an exact quote. Punctuation usually follows the parenthesis If you use the name of your source in a sentence, then you only have to include the date in a parenthesis Any sources that you use in your paper this way will appear in the Works Cited section.
There will also be times that you will read books, encyclopedia, magazine or newspaper articles, or use a Web site to get background information on your topic. If the information is what is generally considered to be common knowledge, then you will not need to mention the sources inside your text. These sources will be included in your Works Consulted section. Up until now, you have all probably used this format at the end of your papers but have called it your bibliography.
Regardless of whether you label your references as Works Cited or Works Consulted, the format that you use to list your sources is exactly the same. Follow these rules:
-
Alphabetize by the author’s last name.
-
If your source does not have an author (as most Web pages don’t), then you alphabetize by the first prominent word of the title, leaving out the words a, an, and the.
-
Use hanging indent (2nd line and each subsequent line of each entry is indented 5 spaces).
-
Tip for hanging indent: Use the Format Menu on Microsoft Word. select Format Paragraph, then next to
Indentation, use the drop down menu under the word Special to select Hanging.
-
Italicize titles of larger bodies of work such as titles of books, titles of encyclopedia, titles of periodicals, and titles of Web sites.
-
Use quotation marks to set off titles of articles, or individual Web pages.
WORKS CITED
Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th
edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Print.
Springfield Township Research Paper Guide. Web.
15 Dec. 2009<http://www.springfield.k12.pa.us/rguide/page8.html>.
Valenza, Joyce. MLA Bibliographic Style--A Brief Guide. Web. 24 Jan. 2009
<http://mciunix.mciu.k12.pa.us/~spjvweb/mla.html>.
WORKS CONSULTED
“Citing Electronic Sources in MLA Style." Longman English Online Citation Guide.
1999. Web. 25 Jan. 2009
<http://longman.owl.com/englishpages/CYBER3.HTM>.
Langhorne, Mary Jo, editor. Developing an Information Literacy Program K-12.
New York: Neal-Schumann Publishers, 1998. Print.
Turabian, Kate A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, These and Disertations, 6th edition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.
Frequently Asked Questions about MLA Style
Click here for the Modern Language Association's answers to common questions on citations, for example, "If a title begins with a numeral, how should the title be alphabetized?"