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What are Citations?

Tutorial Home
  1. What are Citations?
  2. Citing Books
  3. Citing Articles
  4. Citing Websites
  5. Other Common Sources
  6. Putting it Together
  7. In-text Citations
  8. Questions?









A citation is simply a way to document a book, article, website or any source of information used during research. A list of citations creates the bibliography or works cited listing at the end of your research assignment.

Citations contain basic information about the source you used: author, title, publisher, year of publication, format. This information is fairly easy to identify, but you then need to format this information into a proper citation.

This is where things get tricky!

It is absolutely critical that you format your citations correctly, down to the last period and comma. This is not the time to get creative! This tutorial will focus on formatting citations correctly. Let's start with citations for books. Click on the arrow to learn how to cite books.

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