When you write a dissertation, you are often faced with an assortment of citation needs that you can’t begin to address. It is for this reason that correct citation can add to a great paper; conversely, misuse of reference formats can make you look inferior in the academic world. Sometimes we use websites such as “Cite This for Me” to assist in the preparation of references, but unfortunately these tools are often not accurate enough.
MACP (for social science articles and citations) is formatted as “author’s last name, date of article”;
MLA (mostly used in the humanities) has the format “author’s surname, page number”;
Please note, however, that the MLA format requires a separate “references” page, and that all citations should be sorted alphabetically by author’s last name. If the author’s name is not available, the first word of the article or book title may be used instead.
The Harvard format (used primarily for natural and social science papers) is “author’s last name, date of article”;
For internal book citations, it is “Author’s last name, first initial. Year. (Title in italics). Edition number. Location of publisher: Publisher. Page number.”
The Chicago format (for humanities and natural sciences) is primarily in the form of footnotes, which usually appear in the body of the text in the paragraphs where they are required and are marked with numbers in an orderly fashion. Note digits should be consecutive and placed at the end of the sentence, outside of punctuation. Notes should be single-spaced, while entries should be double-spaced.
Both endnotes and footnotes can be used in the Chicago format, with footnotes located at the bottom of the cited document, four lines from the last line of the text. Endnotes are located at the end of the text, on a separate page. The notes section should include: author’s last name (first name first), title of the book/article, publication information for both the book and the article: place of publication, date of publication, page number (the first three items in parentheses), and for the article, the name of the journal, the volume or issue number, the year of publication, and the page number.
