In the course of your research, you will discover information and opinions you did not know before, and you will read sentences or paragraphs that you would like to incorporate into your paper.

Whenever you present new information or someone else's opinion and whenever you quote someone else's words, you MUST document your source. You do not need to cite a source for information that you knew before you started the research, such as "President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963." But if you didn't know it, then you MUST document it. The purpose of documenting is to show where you got your information, opinion, or quotation, and to allow your reader to look up your source. This means you may well cite one or several sources in each paragraph of your paper. With the MLA system, it's easy.

Attention History Majors! If your paper is for a History class, then you must use the footnote/endnote system instead of the MLA. See the Liberal Studies office for guidelines.

The MLA system, also known as parenthetical citations, has replaced the footnote/endnote system, because it is easier to handle and to type. The MLA system consists of two parts: citations in parentheses in your text, and a "Works Cited" page.

1. Whenever you have information you need to document, at the end of the sentence or paragraph in which that information appears you simply add a parentheses containing the author's last name and the page number; for example:

In eighteenth-century Bohemia, peasants paid 41 percent of their gross income as taxes (Black 123).

2. If you have already mentioned the author in your text, then the page number is enough; for example:

As Jeremy Black points out, eighteenth-century Bohemian peasants paid 41 percent of their gross income in taxes (123).

3. If you are citing several works by that author, then you need to give, in addition to his or her name, also a short title; for instance:

Count de Buffon died in 1788 (Worster "Vulnerable Earth" 7).

4. If the author is unknown (as in the case of newspaper articles), then give a short title; e.g.,

Only Mayor McCarthy expressed the least optimism toward the city's future ("Rebirth" 2).  

5. If the work you are citing has two or three authors, then give all their names, for example: (Randall and Donald 271). If it has more than three authors, give the first one and "et al." (meaning "and others"); for example: (Sapperstein et al. 12).

D. The Works Cited Section

At the end of your paper, you must list all the works (and ONLY those) you have cited in your text. They must be in bibliographical form, alphabetically by the author's last name (or, if there is no author, by the title). Examples:

1. A book by one author:

Black, Jeremy. Eighteenth Century Europe. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

2. A book by several authors:

Randall, J.G., and David Donald. The Divided Union. Boston: Little, 1961.

3. An article in a periodical:

Gould, Stephen Jay. "A Most Ingenious Paradox." Natural History Dec. 1984: 20-29.

"Rebirth of a City." News-Times [Danbury, CT] 6/9/1977: 2.

4. An article in a book:

Worster, Donald. "The Vulnerable Earth." In Donald Worster, ed. The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

5. A government report:

Federal Council for Science and Technology. First Annual Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Geodynamics. USIGP-F476, Washington, 1978.

6. An interview:

Interview with Franjo Mulac, custodian, December 12, 1991.

7. The Internet is not a source but a medium. In addition to the URL ("http://www. some-thing.com"), you MUST give the author and the full title of the work you are citing, as if it were in print. Attach a printout of the Internet document to your paper.

These examples illustrate some of the more common kinds of sources you are likely to use. For more complex cases, consult a recent edition of a term-paper manual.

IMPORTANT! Please note the punctuation, underlining, etc. in the above examples: book and periodical titles are underlined or in italics, while article titles are in "quotation marks."

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