Citations

What is a citation and what is it made of? Let's look at an example:

Albertorio, J.R., Holden-Pitt, L. & Rawlings, B. (1999). Preliminary results of the annual survey of deaf and hard of hearing children and youth in Puerto Rico: The first wave. American Annals of the Deaf, 144(5), 386.

Elements

• Good for:
  
  • Easier to know which article you want if you have two with similar titles
  • Easier to cite the article in the text of your paper: (Albertorio, Holden & Rawlings, 1999)
• Format
  
  • Last name first
  • No first names; use their initials (Elizabeth Kathleen Jacobs becomes "Jacobs, E.K.")
  • For up to four authors, the last person in the list is separated with an ampersand ( & )

• Good for:
  
  • Knowing the difference between two articles by the same author, published in different years
  • Figuring out if the article is up to date enough for your research; you don't want a very old article

• Format:
  
  • Never italicized (in slanted font like this)
  • No words are capitalized except:
    • The first word
    • Anything after a colon (a colon looks like : )
    • Proper nouns (names of people or places

Title of Journal
This tells the reader which journal published the article. A journal can be thought of as being similar to a magazine, but with an academic focus. A journal has many different articles in it that may not be related to each other.

Volume, issue, and page numbers
Journals publish new issues several times a year; a year’s worth of issues is usually called a volume. Most people do not want to have to look through four or even twelve issues to find one article. This is why we have volume and issue numbers. Sometimes new issues are published every month, while others are published only three times a year or even less. In the example above, we see that the article was published in the 5th issue of Volume 144. This tells us exactly which magazine to look in, and the page number tells us which page it’s on.

Citation styles
There are different kinds of citations for different fields. Some disciplines use one style, and other disciplines use another; your teacher will tell you which one you should use for your work. The Library has style guides for the two most commonly-used ones here at Gallaudet.

• APA: American Psychological Association; social sciences (such as psychology and sociology)
• MLA: Modern Language Association; liberal arts and humanities

For more information, Gallaudet University's Tutorial and Instructional programs (found here) offers more in-depth information on various citation formats such as APA, MLA, and others. They also offer tutors in English to help you build a good research paper.

To build citations yourself, visit RefWorks and set up a (free) account there: RefWorks (via ALADIN; will work on- or off-campus)

RefWorks is a web-based bibliography and database manager that allows you to create your own personal database by importing references from text files or online databases and other various sources. You can use these references in writing papers and automatically format the paper and the bibliography in seconds.

If you need to learn about RefWorks, read our basic guide.

For more information about downloading information from various sources, see our list of Import Guides.

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Prepared by James McCarthy
Instruction & Reference Librarian
April, 2009