"My professor said I should use APA. What does that mean?"

The first step to citing is to choose a style manual. Did your professor tell you which style manual to use? Look at your assignment or syllabus. If not, be sure to ask what style they prefer. The most common style manuals and those we will focus on in SURF are:

• Modern Language Association (MLA) is used in arts and humanities
• American Psychological Association (APA) is used in psychology and social sciences

Other styles are Chicago Manual of Style used in social science, humanities, and sciences; Turabian used for humanities; and Council of Biology Editors (CBE ) is used in the natural sciences.

These guides (available at the library) will help answer formatting questions such as margins, in-text citations and how to create your “Works Cited” page or Bibliography. Let's learn exactly how to cite books, articles, web sites and more...