How to Cite Sources in your Assignment?

You would never want the plagiarism factor to affect your assignment and spoil the whole academic grade. In that case, students must always cite sources in their assignment that are genuine and reliable as per their content. These days, we have enormous number of sources available online including blogs, official websites and infographics; every newspaper today has its own website and app; therefore, students can very easily gather information from different online publications to support their claims made in the paper.

Collecting information from different sources is a good practice for making your content look more informative, but you cannot simply just copy-paste that content from a website. Every source you choose for your information must be listed properly in your bibliographical context and footnotes as well. Citing a website takes more effort and hard work than you can every assume. Apart from this, based on the various approved citation styles, one has to change the structuring and formatting method for its content.

So without any more delays, let’s just take a look at some super smart ways to cite sources from the website with the help of approved styles. Read this blog further to know more about it-

APA Style

The American Psychological Association style includes the following aspects when it comes to citing sources from a website-

• For any direct quotations, page number writing is an important aspect.
• Within the APA format, references are to be included based on the author’s last name and the year of publication.
• Sources that do not include any date use n.d. in place of the year.
• Structure of APA style – Author, Year/Month/Date of Publication, Article Title, URL.

MLA Style

Students who are in the academic discipline of language, literature or humanities usually follow the format of MLA style for citation. Students need to add the following factors for referencing-

• Author
• Title of source
• Title of container
• Other contributors
• Version Number
• Publisher
• Publication date
• Location of the source

Citing websites with no authors

There are many websites online that government houses generally publish consisting of some official information or; therefore, there’s no name of the author in it. In such cases, the information provided by the sources is quite essential for the student for his assignment, but they cannot name a person in place of the author. In order to avoid such cases, what students can do is-

• Place the title in the first position of the entry.
• For in-text referencing, you must cite the first few words in the reference entry.
• For the title, make use of double quotation marks around the sentence.

In-text Citation

For in-text citation, you must first include the author’s name, followed by a period and then the link of the website. In terms of any additional information, you can also include different sections or numbered paragraphs.

Chicago style

In order to cite your sources in Chicago style, follow the mentioned features for better presentation and listing-

• This kind of citation style includes the name of author, title, sponsor or owner of the site, date of publication, revision date and then the URL.
• If there’s no publication, revision or modification date for the website, then provide an access date.
• You are not necessarily told to include references in the list of bibliography; you can add your references in the footnotes as well.

Harvard style

When it comes to referencing your source in Harvard style, students need to follow the below-mentioned procedure for the same-

• Under this process, in-text citations can be either directly quoted or paraphrased from the source of content. These sources are further located in the body of your text and also contain a segment at the full list of citation.
• You need to place your reference list at the end of the assignment.
• The factors included in the Harvard citation style are – the name of the author, publishing year, title, location of publication, publisher, pages used.
• Your citations must be listed in alphabetical order.

Hope you find this blog helpful for referencing or citation of your sources. Apart from this, if you ever need help regarding your academic papers or assignments, feel free to contact our online academic writing services for professional help and guidance.