Find Style Manuals and Citation Guides-The Library-University of California, Berkeley

Photograph: Students studying, Gardner Stacks, Doe Library

Find Style Manuals and Citation Guides

Style manuals provide guidance on grammar, word usage, punctuation, organizing ideas, and other aspects of writing research papers and scholarly publications. Some also give preferred citation formats for documenting the sources you used.

Your sources include any books, articles, websites, images, media, or other publications that you quote, or that contributed to the ideas you present. Failure to cite your sources is plagiarism, a serious violation of student and professional ethics and possibly of copyright laws.

Typically, you can identify sources by providing notes in parentheses within the text, or note numbers which link to citations giving enough information for a reader to find the source in a library or on the Internet. In addition, a bibliography or complete list of works cited is usually provided at the end of your document.

There are many citation styles that define formats for notes and bibliographies. Which style to use is determined by your instructor or, if you are writing for publication, by the journal or publisher.

Citation styles for humanities and social sciences

In these disciplines and some others, the four most widely used style guides are listed below. These links give sample citations and references to the complete printed guides:

APA Style Guide
From the American Psychological Association. Often preferred for psychology and many other social sciences.
MLA Style Guide
From the Modern Language Association of America. Often preferred for literature, arts, humanities, and in some other disciplines.
Turabian & Chicago Style Guide
From the work of Kate Turabian at the University of Chicago. Often preferred for history and many other disciplines.

Citation styles for health, biomedical, and other sciences

If you are writing in a scientific or engineering discipline or if your instructor requires you to use a style different from the four listed above, try the links below. Many journals and publishers in these disciplines have their own style guides.

Writing Research Papers guide to CBE (Council of Biology Editors) Style
From Monroe Community College.
National Library of Medicine Recommended Formats for Bibliographic Citation
Provides guidelines and sample citations for books, journal articles, conference papers, etc. A supplement gives examples for citing Internet formats such as databases, web pages, e-mail, and discussion lists.
Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences
From the Raymon H. Mulford Library, Medical College of Ohio. "These pages contain links to Web sites which provide instructions to authors for over 3,500 journals in the health and life sciences."
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals
From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. This guide should be used in conjunction with the ICMJE's journals list.

Other style manuals

Many other style manuals are available in the libraries and can be found through OskiCat. To find a specific manual, search its title and/or author. For a generic list, choose the Keyword(s) option and enter: (writing or style) manuals. To make the search more specific, you can add words such as history or biology.

Citation management software

You may want to use a bibliography/footnote-management program, such as EndNote, RefWorks, or Zotero, to store and format citations in a wide variety of styles. Help pages for using these programs are available from the Bioscience and Engineering Libraries.

For more information

See our page on Citing Your Sources.