Citation Styles Guide

This guide was designed to provide you with assistance in citing your sources for your academic assignments. Each page contains resources for a specific citation style used at St. Kate's. You'll find quick citation guides, tutorials, and links to the official citation style websites. Most of your citation issues can be addressed by using these resources

If you have specific citation questions, reach out to a librarian or to the O'Neill Center for Academic Development. They have peer tutors who can answer your citation questions as well.

You'll also find information about reference managers, like Zotero and Mendeley. These software programs are used to store and organize citations, and create bibliographies in your specific citation style. They can be huge time savers! See the Zotero and Mendeley guide for more information.

Quality academic writing is built upon the foundation of other scholars’ work. By citing your sources, you are honoring the work of others who have made your own research possible. Citation styles are the mechanism that you use to distinguish which words and ideas are your own, and which are not. You plagiarize when you fail to acknowledge the work of others and do not follow appropriate citation guidelines. (See the Preventing Plagiarism page for more information).

While there are hundreds of citation styles, the following seven styles are used at St. Kate's.

• APA (American Psychological Association) is used in the social sciences, nursing, education, occupational therapy, and business.
• MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used in English, history, and humanities courses.
• AMA  (American Medical Association) is used by the physical therapy, physician assistant, and nutrition programs.
• Chicago and Turabian is used by the history and theology departments.
• CSE (Council of Science Editors) is used by the biology department.
• ASA (American Sociological Association) is used in sociology courses.

Your instructor should specify which citation style is to be used in a course. If you're not sure, ask! You may use multiple styles as an undergraduate. At the graduate level, your citation style will be determined by your academic discipline.