Skip to Main Content

Introduction to Research: Citation Info

MLA Style Guide

MLA Handbook (8th ed.). (2016). New York.: Modern Language Association of America.

The library owns one copy of the handbook in the reference collection (Call #: Ref. LB2369 .G53 2016).

All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work.

MLA style has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century. The association's guidelines are also used by over 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and magazines and by many university and commercial presses. The MLA's guidelines are followed throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries around the world.

APA Style Guide

Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). (2020). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

The library owns several copies of the style guide (see below). In the Broken Arrow campus library there are two copies of the 7th edition in reference (one copy in Ready Ref. BF76.7 .P83 2020 and a copy in regular reference); additionally there is also a copy on permanent reserve.

The American Psychological Association originally created a publication manual to provide a common structure for all journal manuscripts in the area of the social sciences.

Many other disciplines (including psychology, the behavioral sciences, nursing, personnel administration and many areas within education) have adopted this as their professional writing standard as well.

In an academic environment, you will often be expected to conform to this standard when writing. At this point, you should be mostly concerned with creating an accurate reference list using proper format and providing citations within the text to give credit for an idea or concept to the source from which you got it.

Important Note: There is a new citation format for articles found online (APA Style Guide to Electronic References, 2007). The biggest change is including the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) at the end of the citation instead of: Retrieved on date from name of database.   A link to this resource is below.

If there is no DOI listed (look on the item record and the first & last page of the article), replace that with Retrieved from name of database.

Additional Citation Resources

In the links below you will find a variety of tutorials on citations as well as bibliographic management tools.  Note: neither RefWorks nor EndNote software is provided by NSU.

Citation and Writing Assistance

Do you need help with citations or formatting? A resource area on the 2nd floor of the John Vaughan Library, the Citation Station, (formerly the Center for Tribal Studies) provides official style manuals, English Composition I and II textbooks, as well as a variety of other citation guides to help you.