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College JumpStart!

This guide is for the College JumpStart! program.

Evaluating Resources

Citation Help

OWL @ Purdue - The Online Writing Lab from Purdue University is a great resource to help with any citing questions you may have and it can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

What is a Citation?

From Oregon State University:

A citation is the information needed to locate the article (or book) you are interested in reading.

For articles, a complete citation generally includes:

  • The author's name
  • The title of the article
  • The name of the magazine or journal in which it is located
  • The volume number of the magazine or journal (and sometimes the issue number)
  • The page numbers on which the article is located
  • The date when the article was published

For books, a complete citation generally includes:

  • The author's name
  • The title of the book
  • The publication date
  • The city in which the book was published
  • The book's publisher

Citations are also used to help readers of your papers go to the information you used.

MLA Citation Examples

BOOKS

One author

Le Carre, John. The Constant Gardener. New York: Scribner's, 2001. Print.

Two authors

Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon. Bodily Charm: Living Opera. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Print.

Three authors

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colcomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

More than three authors

Plag, Ingo, et al. Introduction to English Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton, 2007. Print.

No author

New York Public Library American History Desk Reference. New York: Macmillan, 1997. Print.

PERIODICALS

Article in print journal

Piper, Andrew. "Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything." PMLA 121.1 (2006): 124-38. Print.

Article in an online only journal

Shehan, Constance L., and Amanda B. Moras. "Deconstructing Laundry: Gendered Technologies and the Reluctant Redesign of Household Labor." Michigan Family Review 11 (2006): n.pag. Web. 8 Nov. 2007.

Article from journal in an online database

Tolson, Nancy. "Making Books Available: The Role of Early Libraries, Librarians, and Booksellers in the Promotion of African American Children's Literature." African American Review 32.1 (1998): 9-16. JSTOR. Web. 5 June 2008.

ENCYCLOPEDIAS

Online encyclopedia from a library database

"United Farm Workers Union." Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. McMillan Reference USA, 2009. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 15 May 2009.

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Article/Page on a web site

"How to Make Vegetarian Chili." eHow.com. eHow.com, n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2009.

Note: use this general format for citing a web site: Author. "Title". Title of web site. Publisher (if none use n.p.), date of publication (if none use n.d.). Web. Date of access. If URL needs to be included, format is as follows: 
< http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/ >.

URL's are not required unless your instructor requires them, or the reader cannot locate the source without it.

 

For more information see the WSU MLA Citation Guide