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Geography / Urban Studies & Sustainability: Citation Styles

APA Style

Chicago Manual of Style

MLA Style

ACS Style

Citation Managers

Citation Examples

The citation examples on this guide were adapted from any of the following sources:

  • Purdue Owl - APA, MLA, and Chicago Style
  • The Chicago Manual of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style Online
    (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org)
  • MLA Handbook, 8th Edition
  • The ACS Style Guide

Research Assistance

Plagiarism

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to "plagiarize" means:

  • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
  • to use (another's production) without crediting the source
  • to commit literary theft
  • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

All of the following are considered plagiarism:

  • turning in someone else's work as your own
  • copying word or ideas from someone else without giving credit
  • failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
  • giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
  • changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
  • copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not
  • turning in a paper for an assignment that you previously wrote for an entirely different class and passing it off as new work

​Source: "What is Plagiarism?" Turnitin, 2017, http://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism.

Information Needed

Wondering where the information for your citations come from? The following examples show how you would find the information for an article and for a book just by looking at the first page or two of the resource. Note the examples use for MLA style, but can be applicable to the other styles as well in terms of where to locate certain elements needed to build your citations.

To cite an article in MLA, you will need to know the following information (where applicable):

Author(s) or Editor(s), Title of Article, Title of Journal, Issue Number,

Volume Number, Database, Publication Date, DOI/URL, Page Numbers

You can usually find this information on the first page of an electronic article. For print articles, you might have to consult the title page of the journal in addition to the article. The image below shows the first page of an article from a database and where the needed information is located:

First page of article with highlighted citation elements

Be sure to make note of which database (for example, Academic Search Premier) you found the article in.

To cite a book in MLA, you will need to know the following information:

Author(s) or Editor(s), Title of Book, Publisher, Publication Date

You should be able to find this information within the first few pages of the book. For example, in the image below, the title page and the back of the title page contain everything you need to write the citation.

Left: Title Page; Right: Back of Title Page