by Lucy E. Zahnle

Created on: October 23, 2009

Citation formatting is an important part of writing a research paper. Before you start writing your paper, reread whatever instructions may have been supplied for the project, looking to see what type of formatting your professor or supervisor requires. For high school and college research papers, MLA (Modern Language Association) format and APA (American Psychological Association) format are the most common choices, but occasionally another style will be specified.

Once you have determined the style you will use, review textbook, stylebook, or website examples of parenthetical (in-text) citations and source listings for each source you are citing. It is essential to know how to cite different types of sources in your text and how to format different kinds of source listings in your bibliography, works cited page, or references page.

Every fact, statistic, direct quote, indirect quote, or paraphrased bit of information that you use in your paper must be cited in your text. You must also list its source on your works cited page. If you fail to cite all of your supporting information, your paper's validity could be called into question.

Always make certain that you cite the correct source for each bit of information you document. Citing the wrong source of your information makes you look foolish and takes credibility away from your work.

The idea behind citing your research is that other researchers can follow your work back to its source and look at your documentation if they so desire. When you write a research paper, you must use sources that others can locate and access. Unless you are an expert in the subject about which you are writing and can make yourself available for other researchers to visit or you have published volumes of your personal experiences that can be archived and accessed by others, your personal opinions, other than your thesis statement itself, cannot be used as supporting evidence in your research paper. For your paper to have credibility and validity, researchers have to be able to examine your original source materials and those source materials must come from respected experts.

When you present cited information, you need to include, in your text, source attributes which state whose opinions you are using and why the readers should value opinions from that source. Explaining a source's credentials in the research paper's text before presenting a direct quote or other type of information shows the readers that the source is credible.

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