 Welcome to the BC Library's Core Skills Tutorial, Citation 2, How to Cite, the second in a two-part series. Citation can look complicated and arbitrary. But in spite of formatting differences, citation styles all require the same basic types of information. Each time you access a new source, take note of who wrote it, what its title is, and where and when it was published. Keep track of this information as you go, recording it on index cards, in a document or spreadsheet, or with a citation management tool like EasyBib, Sotero, or RefWorks. If you note down this information as you find sources, adding citations later as you write your paper will be quick and easy. Where you find source information depends on the type of publication and its format. Here are a few possible publication types. For a book, the title page and copyright page should provide the information you need. All of this information is also in the library catalog. Sometimes, a book is composed of individual chapters, by different authors. If this is the case, you'll need the chapter title and author, in addition to the book title and editors. For a journal article in a database, everything is right in the database main entry itself. In most databases, you can also export directly to a citation manager. Keep in mind that many journal articles have multiple authors. Make sure you record all of them. Also, you might be used to recording publication dates from magazines or newspapers, but when, for academic journals, is usually noted as volume and issue. Volume is often numbered by year, from the first year of publication, and issue is often numbered in sequence within a volume. For a print journal article, this information is usually available on the article's first page. You may also need to check the journal's table of contents for the volume and issue numbers. Websites are less standard. The title of a page, name of the site, and author are often found near the top of the page. Keep in mind that an author might be an organization, not a person. The publisher might be on an about page. A publication date might be below the title, or you might find a last updated date at the bottom of a page. Copyright dates are often updated annually, even if pages aren't updated. If a copyright date is all that's available, many citation styles would have you use nd for no date. A rule of thumb about websites. If this information isn't clear, it might not be a good source. There are other kinds of sources where who, what, when, and where might not be altogether clear, such as online reports, advertisements from old newspapers or magazines, or a video stream of a news broadcast from the late 1960s. The important thing is to record as much information about this source as you can find. Consult your professor or a style guide if you have any doubts. It can be confusing when the information you want to cite credits another source. And this happens, try to find the original source of information because the source in front of you might be representing the original idea inaccurately or incompletely. If you cannot find the original, record all of the information of the source you have and the who and when of the original source. Once you have recorded the information, putting it in the right format is usually straightforward, even if it's a little tedious. Start by consulting the right resource for the citation style. The three most common styles are APA, Chicago, and MLA. Your professor will likely tell you which to use. Be aware that there are two versions of Chicago. Chicago Notes, which uses footnotes, and Chicago Author Date. A full citation has two parts. The citation itself and a bibliographic entry. The citation is brief and located in the text. Its purpose is to point to the full bibliographic entry. Some, like footnote numbers, just point to the entry. Others, like an author and date in parentheses, give additional information about authorship and currency. The second part, the bibliographic entry, may be located either in the footnote or at the end of a book or article, depending on citation style. It includes just enough information to help a reader find the actual original item or to help a scholar quickly assess the authority of a publication. You can find reliable information about each citation style on the Citing Sources Guide on the library website. You can also find print or e-book manuals for the major styles linked on the Citing Sources Guide or by searching the catalog. Don't forget that librarians are always available to help. They cannot ensure your formatting is 100% correct, but they are happy to help you find the right citation resources to guide you.