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Citation standards

Appropriate citations are a highly contextual matter. There is no one style of citation that is appropriate for every case. Rather than stipulate a particular citation style for all times and places, I encourage students to learn to determine for themselves what standards they should use in a given context. By the end of one's education, one should be familiar with a variety of citation techniques.

The following are some tips for doing citations appropriately:

  • Identify your genre, your audience, and your medium. Look at other similar documents that share those characteristics and notice which citation formats they are using.
  • If you're writing an academic paper, notice that different fields tend to use particular style and citation systems, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago. A good way to identify the appropriate one is to go to the websites of major journals in your field and read their submission guidelines.
  • If you're writing a non-academic text, such as a memo, letter, or whitepaper, consider your medium and audience. What kind of citation would be most useful to your ideal reader?
  • If you're citing online sources, don't just copy the URL. If your document will be read online, perhaps using hyperlinks to cite sources makes the most sense; if your document may be read on paper, ensure that readers can get a good sense of what and where the source document is without having to type in some long URL.
  • Above all, be rigorous in your use of citations—ensuring readers can find your sources as easily as possible—and consistent in how you format them.