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ENG490W English Honors (Fall 2024)

Research Guide for ENG490W with Professor Cahill

Get Help with Your Citations

Citation Styles

While there are many citation styles in academic research, there are two styles that are commonly used in the humanities: MLA and Chicago. APA is often used in the social sciences, and less commonly used in humanities research. ISU Libraries has a helpful video explaining the difference between the three styles.

Example of parenthetical citations in MLA Format, from Purdue OWL

MLA format is commonly used in the humanities, particularly in English and literary studies. It involves the use of parenthetical in-text citations, which means that the citation information is within parentheses beside the quoted or paraphrased information. 

 

Example of footnotes in Chicago Style, from Purdue OWL

Chicago style is commonly used for citing sources in history, but is also used in other humanities disciplines as well as the social sciences.

  • The Chicago Manual of Style Online is the guide to style, usage and grammar for American English published by the University of Chicago Press. It deals with aspects of editorial practice, including citation styles used in document preparation. An Emory login is needed to access this source.
  • Purdue OWL's Guide to Chicago Style
Example of APA Style citations in a student paper, from Purdue OWL

APA is a citation format commonly used in the social sciences.

Citation Managers

Citation managers aid in the gathering and organizing of research materials. Generally they are software installed on your computer, but accessible online or from other computers if you create an account. Two commonly-used ones are Zotero and EndNote.

Need more information? Check out Emory's Guide to Managing Writing Projects.

Zotero

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. You can save references from databases, library catalogs and the web; organize them into collections for projects; and create in-text citations and bibliographies while writing your paper.

 

EndNote

EndNote is a database program for managing bibliographic citations. It automates much of the work of organizing and formatting citations and bibliographies in your writing. EndNote can connect to online sources such as library catalogs and article databases, output results in over 1,000 different bibliographic styles, and more. There are two versions of EndNote -- a standalone desktop program, and EndNote Online/Web, a cloud-based version. If you want to use both, they can be synced so that you have the same references in both places.