Citations & References

Why Are Citations Necessary?

When writing any type of paper for class, you will probably refer to the intellectual work of others as support for your own ideas, arguments, and assertions. As you do so, principles of ethical behavior and of academic integrity demand that you give credit to the originators of the ideas or the specific sentences and phrases you use.

The reason that academic papers require the use of highly detailed methods of making references to the work of others is to avoid the risk of seeming to pass off the work of someone else as your own work. This is one way of defining plagiarism. You should take a look at the library guide Academic Integrity: Resources for Students & Faculty to learn more details about academic integrity and the University's policies.

The following tutorials will go further toward introducing you to the intersection of academic integrity and citations and references.

Principal Styles Used at Piedmont University

This box lists the principal style guides in use at Piedmont University. The list below links to highly detailed guides from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab, the Purdue OWL. You'll find there detailed examples for creating citations and references in the APA, MLA, the Chicago/Turabian styles, and some others in use at Piedmont University. The OWL guides also have great examples of making references to web documents, websites, and other types of online-based information.

You should also look for further detailed introductions and learning materials to the APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, and AMA styles under the links in the navigation menu.

• APA Style - The publication style guide developed and promoted by the American Psychological Association; used by students and scholars in psychology, education, and many of the other social sciences.
• MLA Style - The publication style guide developed and promoted by the Modern Language Association; used by students and scholars in literature and the arts and humanities.
• Chicago/Turabian Style - The publication style guide developed and promoted by the University of Chicago Press; often used by historians, but also used widely in the humanities and social sciences. Turabian style is a somewhat simplified version of the Chicago Style, used most often by undergraduate students.
• AMA Style - The publication style guide developed and promoted by the American Medical Association; used in courses in the Department of Health Sciences in the College of Nursing.
• ASA Style - The publication style guide developed and promoted by the American Sociological Association; used in courses in sociology and political science.
• Other Styles - The Owl has a page that lists citation/reference styles by discipline and provides links, when available, to online guides to their use. This listing includes the Bluebook style for law, citations for government documents, and styles used by several scientific societies, such as the American Chemical Society and IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,