A Comprehensive Guide To Formatting Research Paper Citations

Despite the fact that one might be specialized in crafting a top quality research paper, he or she must know how to make citations. This is because, research paper writing is a process that requires supporting information from a range of sources that are pertinent to the topic. If you employ information in these sources without citing them, your work will be considered inappropriate and therefore, you will lose sensible marks. Here is guideline on how you need to format your citations:

Write the name of the author

The first thing to note down is the name of the author. Here, you have to consider how many of them write the book. For instance, if he is only one, then you need to start with his or her sir name and then the middle name and finish by writing the first name. However, if the author is more than one, you can choose to write all the names of the first author and for the subsequent ones, you can write their initials. An alternative method entails writing only the first author’s names and then representing all the remaining by the phrase “et al.”

Number the citations

For you to have a beautiful text, you need to number you citations. This helps you to identify the number of sources you have used in developed the content of your research paper. You are also able to tell whether you have included all the sources or you have left out some. Always make sure you have used numbers and not bullets.

One author for multiple sources

There is a possibility to encounter multiple sources all of which you want to cite in your research paper that have been authored by only a single person. This should not make you panic or delete the other sources. You can effectively cite all of these sources. All you are supposed to do is to completely cite the first source including the name of the other. For the remaining sources, you only need to write the sir name of the author.

The year of publication and the page number

Once you have the source’ name and the author, you are also supposed to include the year of publication and the page from which the content was derived. This makes it possible to quickly locate the page provided that there is someone who wants to read more about the content.