Which citation style should you use in your writing? That depends. Some disciplines have a strongly preferred style, while others use a variety of styles, even different ones for specific journals. Your professor is the best source for which style you should use in your academic writing for class. When submitting to a journal or other scholarly publisher, always follow their official author guidelines when selecting a citation style.
This guide covers some of the more common styles, but is not intended to be comprehensive.
If you are writing something substantial, like an honors thesis, capstone paper, dissertation, or for publication, you might benefit from using a tool like Zotero to manage your citations. This will allow you to automate most of the work of formatting citations and references, and make it easy to switch among various styles if necessary. See the Managing Citations & Digital Files tab for details.
Citing your sources accurately is an essential part of ethical academic writing. As emphasized by the video below, these basic principles apply:
