How to Cite Sources

Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always.

Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

In school, I was taught to use parenthetical citations to cite my sources. It was drilled into me to cite your sources, cite your sources, cite your sources. Then in college, my professors told me to use footnotes, but I didn’t really know the difference or how to use them. Maybe I’m the only one who was confused by this, but here’s how it works.

In-Text Parenthetical Citations

APA (mostly used for social sciences, business, and education) and MLA style (mostly used for the humanities) require parenthetical citations to cite your sources. For APA, you’ll add the author and date of publication of the source you’re citing in the middle of your work (Catt, 2022). Just like that, with a comma after the last name and a period after the citation. Continue to do this throughout your book or paper whenever you reference someone else’s work.

For MLA, it’s similar, but you use the page number instead of the date of publication (Catt 17). Notice there isn’t a comma after the last name there, but the period still goes after the citation.

Then, for both MLA and APA, at the end of the document, start a new page to list all the information of each source—this lets readers find the original sources. For MLA format, this page is titled “Works Cited.” For APA, it’s titled “References.” List all the sources you cited in alphabetical order by last name. PurdueOwl is really great for creating proper citations since you’ll need to include a lot more information on this page (date, publisher, location, page number, etc.) and put it in a certain order with specific punctuation and style. There are examples on that website to help you get all the information necessary depending on the type of source it is (blog post, book, newspaper article, website, etc.).

Using Notes as Citations

CMOS style (used for most published books written for the masses—not academics) allows notes as a proper way to cite sources. (CMOS is cool with parenthetical citations too, but having parentheses all over the place is a little more conspicuous than little superscript numbers. I always use notes since it’s less distracting for the reader.)

Footnotes and endnotes act the same way as each other; the only difference is where they appear in the document. Footnotes are placed at the bottom of each page a source is cited. Endnotes are placed at the end of each chapter (common when several authors wrote their own chapters) or at the end of the document (common for everything else).

Notes can be used for two purposes:

1. Citing sources: Obviously. That’s what we’re talking about here. Notes, by themselves, can be used to cite your sources as long as you include all the necessary information in each citation, not a shortened citation (more on that later).

2. Adding information: Notes can be used to make comments about your paper that don’t exactly belong in the running text but are worth noting.1

So what’s the difference between endnotes and footnotes? Well, footnotes are easier for the reader to find since they’re just right there. But they can disrupt the flow of the page if the bottom fourth of the page is just footnotes. That’s kind of a turn-off for readers when it’s not an academic paper. Endnotes are harder to find since the reader has to search for them at the end of the book or chapter, but then all the pages look nice. There isn’t much more to it than that. If you’re using notes for additional information or citing the few sources you have (maybe one every few pages), I recommend using footnotes so the info is right there for the reader. If you’re using notes for citing sources and you have a lot of them, I recommend using endnotes so it doesn’t make the pages ugly. Is there a right way to do it? Nope. This is just my opinion.

Bibliography?

Once you decide if you want to use endnotes or footnotes, you have to decide if you want to use a bibliography too. You don’t need a bibliography if the full citation is included in each note. But you do need one when using shortened notes (kind of like how you need a list of sources with the parenthetical citations for MLA and APA since just the bare minimum information is provided in the text). When using short-form notes, you can keep the notes to a minimum and provide the full citation in the bibliography at the end of the publication.

Here’s an example of what a full note can look like when using all the necessary information and not using a bibliography.

1. Carly Catt, “How to Cite Sources,” Self-Publishing Blog. Catt Editing, August 26, 2024, https://www.cattediting.com/resourcehub/citingsources.

When using a bibliography in tandem, you can use shortened notes in the text and put the rest of the information in the bibliography at the end of the text. Here is what that looks like. The shortened note gives the reader enough information to find the full citation in the bibliography if they want more information without cluttering up the bottom of the page (footnotes) or end of the chapter (endnotes).

1. Catt, “How to Cite Sources.”

Catt, Carly. “How to Cite Sources.” Self-Publishing Blog. Catt Editing, August 26, 2024. https://www.cattediting.com/resourcehub/citingsources.

Are You Confused?

To reiterate, here are all your options for CMOS (book) citations. (APA and MLA are straight-forward, so you got those.)

1. Shortened notes as footnotes at bottom of the page + full notes in bibliography at end of book

2. Full notes as footnotes at bottom of page

3. Shortened notes as endnotes at end of each chapter + full notes in bibliography at end of book

4. Shortened notes as endnotes at end of book + full notes in bibliography at end of book (But why would you do this? The lists will be right after one another at the end of the book, so that would be redundant and annoying. Don’t do this one.)

5. Full notes as endnotes at end of each chapter

6. Full notes as endnotes at end of book

Still confused? Contact me, and I can create your citations for you!

Tricky Situations

1. Let’s say you are quoting someone’s talk at a conference. It’s not published; they just said it in a speech. In this case, include all the information you know: the name of the speaker; the date, name, and location of the conference; and the title of their talk. If you don’t know some of these, that’s okay. Look on YouTube for a recording of their talk. If the quote you’re citing is in that video, you can quote that video instead. Include whatever information you can to cite that talk at the conference.

2. Let’s say you are quoting a really famous quote that is attributed to a ton of people and no one at the same time—no one knows who said it first. This quote is all over the internet, and almost everyone has heard it before somewhere. In this case, no citation is needed. Again, citations are meant to help the reader find more information about the quote or speaker. If a citation won’t help them do that because it’s all over the place anyway, no citation is needed.

I hope this helped you out a little when trying to cite sources. If you have questions, feel free to email me or visit PurdueOwl. They really have a treasure trove of information on this!

At this point, you might be thinking this is way too much work to do. If that’s you, contact me and I’ll do it for you! :)

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1. For example, you can define terms or give history about the topic at hand. This doesn’t have to concern sources at all. You can just add extra information like I did here.