Circa Citation Guide
Curious how to cite primary and secondary sources? Need to know the difference between a bibliography and a works cited page? Lost when it comes to footnotes? Get caught up on everything you need to know about citations with Circa’s citation guide.
What is a Citation?
A citation is an organized way of reporting where you found a piece of information. A citation clearly and concisely presents the most important information about a source. With this information, your reader could locate the source themselves. Furthermore, with this information, your reader can make a general assessment of where you found your facts and whether they judge this source to be credible and relevant to your argument.
What does a Citation Look Like?
Different kinds of sources—books, music videos, blog posts, etc.—all have their own citation formats. But the overriding principle is that information is presented clearly, succinctly, and in the same general format across an entire paper.
Let’s look at the example of citations for the book and film versions of Little Women:
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868.
Gerwig, Greta, dir. Little Woman. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2019. https://www.netflix.com/il-en/title/81140933
The differences between the two formats stem from the fact that we need different information for different kinds of sources. We need to know the director of a film, for instance, while we need to know the author of a book. At the same time, these two citations share clear commonalities. They are both presented in similar ways, with the creator first, the title second, the distributer third, and the date fourth. With these commonalities, a reader can quickly locate the information they are looking for.
Why are Citations Necessary?
Citations allow your readers to see where you found the facts to support your argument. This information is critical. First, a reader can then assess if they agree that a source is credible and relevant to an argument. Furthermore, if a reader is particularly interested in a detail within the text, they can reference the original source to learn more for themselves.
Citations also allow for another important aspect of research: research must be repeatable. Just like scientific experiments only hold up to scrutiny if other scientists can independently verify the results, so too does social science research need to be repeatable. An author telling their readers to take their word that something in history happened in a certain way is far less convincing that showing how readers could examine the same set of sources themselves. And sometimes, readers take authors up on the challenge of going through the same research! These second looks can sometimes offer interesting counterpoints to established arguments.
Different Categories of Citations
There are two main kinds of citations: those citations that go within a text and those citations that come at the end of your research.
In-Text Citations
The citations found within the text tell readers the information that they need to know immediately: the author, title, and date of the source in which you found your information. A reader can use this abbreviated information to decide for themselves if they agree that this source is credible and appropriate for your argument. In-text citations can also provide more specific information about where you located exact data. For instance, in-text citations can list things like the page number or timestamp at which the exact information can be located. For a reader who wants to learn more on their own, they could use these citations to turn quickly to the correct chapter, page, or film scene.
In-Line Citations vs Footnotes
Within in-text citations, there are two main ways in which an author can cite a source. The method more typically used in high school and in the sciences is an in-line citation. In this method, the author puts the most relevant citation information in parentheses directly after the sentence in which information from that source is used. These kinds of sources are easy to produce for the writer, and they can also be convenient for the reader, who doesn’t have to go looking for a particular citation. At the same time, these citations can really get in the way of reading a text, since they interrupt the flow of writing with citation information.
The other citation that comes within a text is the footnote. Footnotes have a superscript number next to the information taken from a text. The full source is then given at the bottom of the page next to the same number. Footnotes are most often used in university humanities and social science writing, since they make it much easier to read the text itself. The smaller numbers do not clutter up the text. Furthermore, once footnotes are at the bottom of the page, there is more room to add in additional citation information, sentences that explain the source, or even further details about the information itself. High school students often find footnotes intimidating, but they are very easy to use in any word processing program (like Word or Pages).
Ending Citations
At the end of a research paper, it is typical to include a list of sources. This list helps readers see immediately the kinds of sources that you consulted to produce your argument. It also serves as a longer reference for readers who might have been interested in one of the sources mentioned in your footnotes.
Citations at the end of the text offer more details about the sources than in-text citations. The ending list of sources, for instance, might tell a reader which sources are primary sources and which are secondary sources. The ending list might also list all of the sources from the same archive together, so a reader can get a better sense of the research that the author conducted and where information about this topic is housed today.
Bibliography vs Works Cited
A bibliography is a list of everything you consulted in your research, whether the content in these sources made it into your paper or not. A bibliography can be useful to other scholars because it creates a list that anyone could consult if they want to research a similar topic. It also provides a clear list of everything that might have influenced you as you worked on the paper.
A works cited page is a list of only those sources that you cited within the paper. This list is often used for publications, where space is at a premium. Additionally, the streamlined list helps readers more quickly identify particular sources that they might want to research more themselves.
Different Styles of Citations
There are many different citation styles. The most commonly used styles in history, humanities, and the social sciences are the Chicago Style and the MLA style. But there are far more than just these two. You might encounter other citation styles as you read more scholarly sources. Or your teacher might prefer that you use a different format entirely.
One style of citation is not inherently better than any other style. In many ways, citation styles are like different styles of fonts: they might look different, but in the end, they all convey the same information. However, the differences between different citation styles mean that some styles are considered to be more useful for certain kinds of research (just like some fonts match certain ideas or projects better than others). The APA style is often considered to be more convenient for science research, for instance, so it is often seen in research in the sciences. Historians tend to prefer the Chicago Style, while humanists generally work with the MLA style.
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