Citation style

A set of rules for how to credit your sources: what details to include, in what order, and how to punctuate and format them.

A citation style is a set of established rules for documenting sources. It decides which facts about a source you give, how they are arranged and punctuated, and how they appear in your text and in your list of sources.

The big styles use much the same information (who wrote it, what it is called, when and where it was published) and arrange it differently. Different fields stress different details, which is part of why the styles differ.

• APA is used mainly in the social sciences, including psychology, education and business.
• MLA is used in the study of languages and literature.
• Chicago is used mainly in history, philosophy, religion and the arts.
• Harvard is a family of author–date styles, and IEEE is a numbered style used in engineering and computing.

APA and MLA tie in-text citations to a list at the end. Chicago also offers footnotes or endnotes.

Which one to use. Your instructor, department or journal chooses. If the assignment doesn’t say, ask. PaperCitation produces citations in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago (author-date), Harvard and IEEE. Styles change between editions, so check which edition your course expects.