Citation Resources
Want to really feel confident in your MLA citations? Click the above image or this link to complete the interactive MLA citation tutorial (Will take roughly 15-20 minutes to complete). This will give you hands-on experience creating in-text and full citations in MLA style for most source types (articles, books, and websites).
MLA Citation Resources Online:
Questions about other styles? Eloise is happy to help!
Annotated!?
An annotated bibliography is quite similar to bibliographies/works cited you may have written in the past. The primary difference is that for an annotated bibliography, you are telling your reader a bit more about each source and your usage of it.
An annotated bibliography often DESCRIBES (includes 1-2 sentences about the main idea of the source), EVALUATES (discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the research and arguments), and CONNECTS (explains how you plan to use this source in your work- both content-wise (I plan to use this in my historical background, I plan to use the statistical data) and in approach (This aligns with the arguments in X source, this provides a well thought our counter-narrative that I will argue against).
Depending on your assignment, you might focus on one or two of these annotation-parts.
General Guidelines
Best Practices for citing:
- Cite in-text and as you go to attribute quotes from, paraphrases of, or summaries of a source.
- If you create an outline, include citations in it as well so you don't need to go back to try to find what information you get from what source.
- Often, quotes are best saved for work that you are centering and/or analyzing. If you are referencing general ideas or laying out what research has been done on this topic, paraphrases and summaries are preferred.
- Citation generators can be helpful, but they are often incomplete (including citations from Worldcat or other academic databases). Feel free to use these tools, but always double-check with a model from a trusted source.
- Need help figuring out the structure of a citation or how to know what pieces of information for a citation you need and where to find them? Librarians are happy to help!