Your professor says that you need to make a bibliography or list of resources for your paper. What do you do?
A bibliography is a list of sources about a certain topic. When a student writes a paper, the instructor of the class often wants the student to include a list of sources that were used when writing the paper. The items in the list are put in the form of citations. A citation is a way to describe all of the main publication elements of the source that was used. Citations to journal articles typically include the author, article title, journal title, volume number, page number(s), and date of the article. Citations to books usually include author, title, publisher, and date.
The instructor sometimes tells students to follow a certain citation “style.” This means that the format of the citations should follow the rules that are laid out in a publication called a style manual or citation manual. There are a few style manuals that are used very often in classes at UNI. These include The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (usually referred to as APA); the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (often referred to as MLA); and the Chicago Manual of Style. There are also some other popular manuals such as the manual called Turabian, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style. Copies of all of these manuals are kept at the Reference desk and the Reserve desk for use within the library. Sometimes there are also copies in the Stacks, and those copies can be checked out of the library.
Panther Prowler, and some individual databases, also include suggested citations from some of the major style manuals when looking at the search results. Although these are useful, they are computer generated and so should always be checked against the individual manuals, which sometimes have specific rules.
EndNote [1] provides citations in the style of your choosing. Set up a profile in EndNote [2] to use this program.
Rod Library also provides links to online guides [3] to citation styles.
