The Basileiad Library at Manor College. Information Literacy course. Works Cited.

Citation refers to the way in which you describe the resources you used in researching your assignment. If you use someone else's words in the body of your paper, you must let the reader know everything about the resource it came from, and you must do this in a fixed way.

There are four main formats for citation: MLA, Turabain, Chicago, or APA.

Most classes at Manor require citation of resources to be in the MLA (Modern Language Association) format. Listed below are the most commonly used examples of MLA citation, but remember there are others. Note that the second and later lines are indented. Some teachers prefer to have the title underlined, some prefer to have it in italics. Either is correct.

Books.
If you are citing a book, take your information from the title page inside the book, not the cover. The date of publication is on the back of the title page. An example of an MLA citation for a book is:

Matthews, Martin. S. and Erik B. Poulson. FrontPage 2000: The Complete Reference.  Berkeley:
    Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1999.

Note that the first author has his last name first, but the second author has their first name first.

Journal articles.
When citing an article in a journal, the title of the journal is underlined, followed by the date and the page numbers. Scholarly journals are cited differently from popular journals. Scholarly journals often have the first page number starting with a number other than 1. This means that the pagination continues throughout the year. Articles from a database are cited differently.

Scholarly journal article:
If the pages begin at 1 at the beginning of the year and then continue through the year, use this method:

Felippe, Luis Antonio & Luis Clovis Cardoso Vieira. "Reestablishing biologic width with forced eruption."
    Quintessence International 34 (2003): 733-738.

If the page numbers begin at 1 for each issue of the journal, the citation looks like this, showing the volume (35) and the issue (3) before the page numbers:

Abdoo, Ann. "A World Beyond the Reservation." American Libraries 35.3: 36-38

Popular journal article:

Adler, Jerry. "The War on Strokes." Newsweek March 8, 2004: 43-48.

Electronic resources.
If you use an electronic resource you also need to include the date you accessed the resource.

Web site:

Buddhanet.net. Buddha Dharma Education Association, Inc. 1992-2004. 8 Mar. 2004
     <http://www.buddhanet.net>

The first date is the date the web site was copyrighted or created, the second date is the date you looked at it. The author/creator is usually listed at the bottom of the web page, as is the date the page was created (or the copyright date). The copyright symbol is ©. If you can't find a date of creation, try entering javascript:alert(document.lastModified) in the url address line.

 Make sure the url is not hyperlinked. To remove the link, highlight the url, click on the 'ball and chain' icon at the top of your screen, and click on 'remove hyperlink'.

Ebook:

Sanders, William B. JavaScript Design. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders, 2001. Safari Tech Books Online
       <http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com>

Kressel, Neil jeffrey. Mass Hate: the global rise of genocide and terror. Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2002.
        netLibrary <http://netlibrary.com>

Electronic journal article:

Choawaney, Nonin. "Interdependence" Prairie Wind. 9:1 (2000). 8 Mar. 2004   
    <http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/7228/prairiewindspring00.pdf>

EBSCOhost article:

Bono, Christopher M. "Low Back Pain in Athletes." Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. 86:2 (2004)
     Available from Academic Search Elite EBSCOhost. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.search.epnet.com>

For a complete listing of all of the types of resources you could ever use, and the correct way of citing these, use one of the following from the library:

          Gibaldi, J. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: The Modern
          Language Association of America, 2003.
          Hult, Christine A. & Thomas N. Huckin.  The New Century Pocket Guide for Writers. New
          York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
          Raimes, Ann Keys for Writers: a brief handbook. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

More examples online can be found at the Basileiad Library MLA Citation Guide.

That is the end of the Information Literacy program. Please remember that this web site, and the library itself, has been developed for you, the student of Manor College. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please email the librarian at mrsmith@manor.edu. 

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