Citing Sources

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Marie Holland Library Student Guidebook

Introduction to the Marie Holland Student Guidebook
Why bother to cite the sources you use for your project? Here are a couple of answers to that perennial question: First, you need to give credit to the people or institutions whose work you are borrowing. Second, as a scholar, you want to give your reader enough information to check your sources and confirm the accuracy of your work.

This Marie Holland Library Student Guidebook to Works-cited Lists and Internal Citations is based on the 2009 MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th edition). This latest edition of the MLA Handbook offers new and different guidelines for works-cited entries and gives a great deal more attention to Web sources. Our school guide reflects that new approach.* As always, the Marie Holland Library Guidebook is a short guide to the most-used types of entries addressed in the MLA Handbook.

The MLA system has several characteristics: It is simple, depending on brief in-text references to straightforward entries in a list at the end of your work of the sources you’ve used.  It is modular. For example, in some Web source subsections in this guide, you will find a formula for combining a traditional print source entry with simple Web information to create a Web source entry. This sort of formula also appears in the non-Web section of our guide. In all these formulas, a plus sign indicates how you can add two sorts of information together to make your entry. In the following model for an Interview entry, note how the plus sign (+) guides you to start with the two pieces of interview information and then add information from another entry to show where your interview information came from—whether a radio program, a book, a magazine, or other non-Web source:

Interviewee’s Last Name, First Name. “Title of Interview” (or Type of interview).
+ Entry for non-Web source consulted.

Finally, the MLA system is flexible. No manual can cover every possible source, especially in this age of fast-changing Web sources. The MLA Handbook emphasizes that you will need to use given models when they work and adapt or combine MLA models when your source doesn’t have the traditional information or is a type of source not addressed by the MLA Handbook. For example: When your source does not have a piece of information you need for your entry, one easy solution is to skip that piece and move on to the rest of the entry. Another solution might be to use traditional abbreviations to show that information is missing: n.p. (no city of publication, no publisher), n. pag. (no page numbers), or n.d. (no date).
The bottom line: Be consistent in the way you treat your entries, whichever models you end up using.

The 2012 Marie Holland Student Guidebook is organized to follow the new MLA Handbook approach. In our new guide, you will find two major sections: “Print and Other Non-Web Sources” and “Web Sources.” Under “Print and Other Non-Web Sources,” you will find entries for sources ranging from books and magazines to cartoons, interviews, and films. Under “Web Sources,” you will find subsections for entries for materials from Web sites and subscription databases. Several of these subsections use the modular MLA style by giving you a formula for combining a non-Web entry (for a magazine, let’s say) with simple Web information (for a Web site, let’s say) to create the entry for a magazine article you find on a Web site.

In our Marie Holland guide, each entry for a works-cited list also shows an example of an internal citation for that entry. An internal citation is an acknowledgment within the text of your work that you are using someone else’s words, facts, or ideas. It will refer to a work (or a specific location in a work) in your works-cited list. It does this by embedding the first word or words of the works-cited entry in one of two ways: If the source has page numbers, you can use a parenthetic note—for example:

(Dweck 12)

If the source does not have page numbers, the internal citation will be incorporated into the sentences of your text—for example:

Pennings’s article will interest calculus students and dog lovers.

_______________
*Two notes about the new MLA approach:

First, the MLA Handbook now recommends that you name the medium of the sources you consult. Thus in our examples you will find medium-of-publication labels like Print and Web.

Second, MLA recommends not using URLs as part of the entries for works cited from Web sources. Our new guide follows that recommendation. However, in our examples you will find an indication of the form and location for URLs should your teacher ask you to include them.

 

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