Documenting Sources

Every academic discipline has specific conventions about how writers are supposed to cite their sources, and when you want to write a research paper in a particular field, you need to follow those conventions precisely. There are style manuals, such as the Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, that outline how to go about properly citing books, articles, dissertations, lectures, interviews, CD-ROMs, the Internet, films, and almost any other type of source imaginable. These style manuals explain whether it is appropriate to cite texts within the body of the paper or whether you should use footnotes or endnotes. They show you what publication information needs to be included in a complete citation, how to list sources in a final reference list, and the exact way any type of citation should appear, down to where to use periods, commas, and colons.

You may see no reason to include the city of publication as well as the publisher in a footnote, and you may not think it’s important whether a comma or period comes after the author’s last name on a “Works Cited” page, but many professors will expect this sort of precision from you, and for good reason. Scholars in different fields have created specific citation styles to fit the way they work. When they write, they follow these conventions, down to the punctuation, so they don’t accidentally leave out something important, and so their colleagues know exactly where to look to find the information they need. Your professors and preceptors will require your work to conform to the established conventions of their field. (For more information on the purpose of citation, see the Writing Center handout “When to Cite Sources.”)

To give you an idea how different the documentation styles in various fields are, take a look below at how an article by Stephen Jay Gould published in The New York Review of Books would appear if cited in papers for literature, psychology, and biology classes.

Literature (using MLA style)

Following a quotation or reference to page 12 of the text, the author would include the parenthetical citation (Gould 12).

On the Works Cited page, the article would be listed as:

Gould, Stephen Jay. “The Birth of the Two-Sex World.” The New York Review of Books 38.11 ( June 13, 1991), 11-13.

Psychology

Following a quotation or reference to the text, the author would include the parenthetical citation (Gould, 1991).

In the Reference List, the text would appear as:

Gould, S. J. (1991). The birth of the two-sex world. The New York Review of Books, 38(11), 11-13.

Biology
Many of the sciences and mathematics are much less strict or uniform about documentation style, which tends to vary from journal to journal. Following a quotation or reference to the text, the author might name the source (Gould, 1991), or might use a superscript number, such as 1, or a parenthetical number, such as (1), to indicate the number of the article in the final list of references.

In the final list of References, the article would appear as:

1. Gould, S. J. 1991. The birth of the two-sex world. The NewYork Review of Books 38.11: 11-13.

As you can see, the differences in documentation style from field to field are significant, so you really need to work with the style manual that your professor prefers. Although there is a list of style manuals below, you should check with your professor because some fields use more than one. Some English professors, for instance, require their students to use MLA form, while others require students to use what is called Chicago style, which is outlined in Kate Turabian’s manual (see the listing below).

The list of style guides for different disciplines offered below is adapted from Jean Johnson’s The Bedford Guide to the Research Process. Please let us know if there is a manual missing from the list that you think the Writing Center should include in the future. You can find these texts in the reference sections of Princeton’s libraries.

Style Guides

General

Johnson, Jean. The Bedford Guide to the Research Process. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Van Leunen, Mary-Claire. A Handbook for Scholars. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Humanities

Gibaldi, Joseph, and Walter Achert. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 4th ed. New York:
MLA, 1995.

Turabian, Kate. Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations. 6th ed. Chicago:    University of Chicago Press, 1987.

McCoy, Florence N. Researching and Writing in History: A Practical Handbook for Students.    Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 1974.

Social Sciences

American Psychological Association. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: APA, 1983.

Goehlert, Robert U. Political Science Research Guide. Monticello, IL: Vance Bibliographies, 1982.

Sociology Writing Group. A Guide to Writing Sociology Papers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

Sternberg, Robert J. Writing the Psychology Paper. Woodbury, NJ: Barron, 1977.

Sciences

American Chemical Society. Handbook for Authors of Papers in American Chemistry Society Publications. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1978.

American Institute of Physics. Style Manual. New York: American Institute of Physics, 1978. \

American Mathematical Society. A Manual for Authors of Mathematical Papers. Providence, RI:    American Mathematical Society, 1980.

Cochran, Wendell et al. Geowriting: A Guide to Writing, Editing and Printing in Earth Science.    Alexandria, VA: American Geological Institute, 1979.

Huth, Edward J. How to Write and Publish Papers in the Medical Sciences. Philadelphia: Institute for Scientific Information, 1982.

Related Writing Center Handouts

When to Cite Sources
Using Quotations
Plagiarism            

© 1999 Princeton Writing Program