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How to Use this Guide
Welcome! This guide is designed to help you write better, avoid plagarism, and impress your professors with clear, confident citations and references. This guide includes information on writing and publication in various disciplines, including formatting manuscripts and cite sources. This guide is here to support you—not stress you out. Skim it, search it, read it beginnning to end if you choose. Got questions? Library staff is here to help.
Use the tabs on the left for information on the AP, APA, ASA, Chicago/Turabian, MLA, and Science citation styles and information on citing government information. Need Help? Library support is just a click away! Use the links below the side bar tabs to chat with a librarian and view frequently asked questions.
You can click here to find information on managing your research by using the citation management tool RefWorks.
Why Should You Care About Referencing?
Referencing is about giving credit where it’s due, and it’s one of the main ways we build trust and credibility in academic work. If you use someone else’s ideas without citing them? That’s plagiarism--kind of like stealing someone’s work and putting your name on it. It’s a big deal, with real academic and even legal consequences.
Walker and Taylor (2006,The Columbia Guide to Online Style) break referencing down into five key principles:
- Intellectual Property – Ideas are owned. Give credit, or it’s theft. It’s about more than rules—it’s about ethics and contributing to a larger conversation in your field.
- Access – Want others (including your professor) to check your sources? Citations make that possible.
- Economy – You don’t have to write a whole paragraph—just enough info for someone to find the source.
- Transparency – A clear citation style helps others follow your thinking and research trail.
- Standardization – When everyone uses the same system, citations make sense across subjects and disciplines.
Still wondering why it really matters? Neville (2007, The Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding Plagiarism ) lists 9 reasons to cite your sources:
- To trace the origins of ideas
- To connect ideas into a bigger picture
- To discover and develop your own voice
- To make your arguments stronger
- To share knowledge with others
- To show respect for other scholars
- To show who and what influenced your thinking
- To meet grading criteria
- And yes—to avoid plagiarism
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Why Should I Cite?Take a look at this tutorial for more information on sources.
Video Tutorials
Academic Integrity
What sort of information needs cited and how can you respect it in your research? Find out more by viewing this video on academic integrity.
The Mansfield Library subscribes to RefWorks to make research and citation easier for you. RefWorks is a citation management tool that stores your electronic articles in one place for easy access, organization, citation and sharing. You can save web page content and metadata, create collections to organize or share documents and citations, and upload PDF and Office documents.
VIDEO - Learn how to use RefWorks by watching these short videos