Citation Best Practices: Sample citations

In-text citation 

• MLA provides two ways to provide in text citation--"in prose," and "parenthetical": 
• Incorporating it into your own sentence: Abd-Rabbo has provided new insight into the works of Chinua Achebe 
• Using parenthetical in text citation: Thanks to new critical insight into the works of Chinua Achebe (Abd-Rabbo)
  • You can also add a page number to the parenthetical citation (Abd-Rabbo 57)

List of Works Cited 

• Journal article

  • Abd-Rabbo, Muna. "Overlapping Character Variations in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 49, no. 1, 2019, pp. 55-81.

• Book

  • Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1987.

Chicago style allows for footnotes or in text citation. Chicago calls their "in text citation" style:  author-date

In-text citation

An example using both parenthetical author-date (Mnookin reference) and author referenced in sentence with date only within the parentheses (Albiston reference). Example is taken from the Chicago Manual of Style Online: 

As legal observers point out, much dispute resolution transpires outside the courtroom but in the “shadow of the law” (Mnookin and Kornhauser 1979). . . . Here we empirically demonstrate that workers’ and regulatory agents’ understandings of discrimination and legality emerge not only in the shadow of the law but also, as Albiston (2005) suggests, in the “shadow of organizations.”

Reference List entries if using author-date system:

• Books

  • Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin.

• Journal articles: 

  • Morrison, Jago. 2018. "Tradition and Modernity in Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy." Research in African Literatures 49 (4): 14-26.

In-text citation: 

According to Jones (1998), "students often had difficulty using APA style, especially when it was their first time."

She stated, "Students often had difficulty using APA style" (Jones, 1998), but she did not offer an explanation as to why.

Reference list: 

• Books

  • Beins, B. (2012). APA style simplified: Writing in psychology, education, nursing, and sociology (1st ed). John Wiley & Sons. DOI (if available)
    • note that the first word of the title and the first word of the subtitle are the only words capitalized
    • DOI looks like this: https://doi.org/10.1037/0000168-000

Journal articles:

• Friedman, D. A. (2019). Citation as a social practice in a TESOL graduate program: A language socialization approach. Journal of Second Language Writing, 44, 23-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2019.01.00
• Below is a sample with multiple authors--also note issue number (absent from the example above): 
  • Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy