The Baker’s Dozen – Citation Styles

Citations are a critical component in academic documents, including the much-dreaded dissertation. Citations are used to acknowledge and credit the original source of information or data in written works. There are many citation styles and each institution has a favored style. Each style has its own requirements for documenting sources and professional writers should be familiar with each of the major styles.

The Citation Styles

Some of these styles are nation-specific (Great Britain and Australia) or industry-specific that have been adopted by educational facilities. Educational institutions will frequently specify which citation style is to be used in their facilities. Dissertation authors should make sure they understand the requirements of the citation style to ensure they are preparing their document accordingly.

MLA Citation

MLA style was developed by the Modern Language Association, which is located in New York City. MLA style uses parenthetical notations within the body of the document that references an alphabetized entry at the end of the book or document. Footnotes and endnotes are not used for citation purposes with MLA as a general rule.

APA Citation

APA style was developed by the American Psychological Association, which is located in Washington, DC, for use in their publication efforts. Many students and even academic instructors use “APA style” to reference the citation style, but APA style goes far beyond citations, encompassing many issues including punctuation, abbreviations, selection of headings, presentation of statistics, and construction of tables.

ASA Citation

ASA style was developed by the American Sociological Association, which is also located in Washington, DC. In a manner similar to APA style, ASA style goes far beyond just citation, covering a broad range of manuscript issues and was originally intended for use in their publication efforts. It is highly recommended that dissertation authors access the official ASA guidelines from the Association website (www.asanet.org) to familiarize themselves with all the ASA style requirements.

AMA Citation

AMA style was developed by the American Medical Association, which is located in Chicago, IL. AMA style was developed as a writer’s guideline for submissions to the Journal of the American Medical Association and focuses on the citation of resources with many unique citation requirements. The AMA does not appear to publish an individual style manual, but many higher education institutions have AMA guidelines on the institutional websites.

AP Citation

AP style was developed by the Associate Press, an organization of professional news reporting agencies and individuals, and is almost universally required for students pursuing a career in news journalism. AP style covers resource citations and many issues of grammatical standards. Although the AP does have an online version of their complete style guidelines, at last check (Summer 2008) they charged a monthly fee for accessing the document.

APSA Citation

APSA style is a lesser-known style developed by the American Political Science Association. It covers resource citations, grammatical standards, and physical presentation parameters. The APSA guidelines are usually found on university and college websites, often buried within the pages of political science departments.

MHRA Citation

Developed by the Modern Humanities Research Association (an organization in Great Britain), MHRA style first came on the scene in the late 1960s to early 1970s, with the first official style guide being published in 1971. It is a lesser-known style in the United States but is quite common in Great Britain. There is an official MHRA guidebook available online from the MHRA website (www.mhra.org.uk).

Chicago Citation

Also noted as CMS or CMOS (short for Chicago Manual of Style), Chicago style is a citation style designed for use in publishing environments. It encourages the use of footnote and endnote citations over in-text citation and over the use of bibliographic citation lists, though bibliographies are not prohibited by the style. As a middle ground with educational environments, the Turabian style was developed based upon the Chicago style.

Turabian Citation

Turabian style is based on Chicago style, but is specifically targeted towards classroom and general educational environments. It differs from MLA and APA styles significantly, most obviously in the realm of footnote and endnote use, which Turabian style encourages, over the use of in-text citation notes.

Harvard Citation

Harvard method specifically addresses the use of parenthetical citations in the body of a document. It is not considered a separate citation style, but is incorporated as a standard in full citation style guidelines elsewhere.

Bluebook Citation

Bluebook style is one of the most common citation methods, though few people have ever heard its name. Bluebook style addresses the citation of legal materials for quick shorthand by the court systems. It is one of the simplest citation styles used in our society, though it is also one of the most important.

Oxford Citation

Oxford style is the Great Britain version of Chicago style, in essence. The style is use extensively in the British Empire and focuses on the use of footnote and endnote citations, though unlike the Chicago style, an end-of-document bibliography is also expected.

Vancouver Citation

The Vancouver style is primarily found in use in Australia. Its style is close kin to the Oxford and Chicago styles.

Problems with Citation Styles

The most commonly cited problem (pardon the pun) with citations is a lack of standardization. In the United States alone, there are over a half-dozen different styles, each with unique applications, each with glaring flaws, and each with rather outspoken advocates for its claimed supremacy over the other styles.

Fortunately, most institutions and academic instructors inform the students in their facility or classroom which of the citation styles they are to use. All too often, however, this guidance stops at that point. Most students have no idea what the requirements of each style are or what information they need to cite in the first place. Some instructors state that commonly known information does not need to be cited, but what constitutes “common” knowledge? Another problem with available citation styles is the fact most of them were created well before the era of the Internet and offer little guidance to the documentation and citation of Internet and other electronic media resources. It is clear that improvements are necessary, but like many such issues the core question is “where do we begin?”