You may use several formatting styles during your time as a student. Your paper itself will follow formatting styles. This may include how you title and sign your name to the paper, margin sizes, spacing, font choice, indents, and headers. These formatting choices also apply to citation information as well. Styles dictate what information is necessary for both in-text and bibliography citations, how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting of the works cited page. The three styles you may use at Blue Ridge are:
Consult your course syllabus or professor to determine what is required in your specific course.
A reference note in a paper with a corresponding description of the source material in a bibliography. A citation is a way to give credit where credit is due. This involves in-text citations, which are found in your paper itself, and bibliographic citations, which come at the end of your paper. Typically, a citation will include the author's name, date of publication, name and location of the publishing company, and title of the work. In the case of a digital works a citation may include a or DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which is the "digital address" of the resource. Information and formatting of citations varies throughout ALA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian. This is why it is best to your citations check our guide.
A works cited/reference generator that pulls information from across the web, or the source of article, to create a formatted bibliographic citation. Using a citation machine from the web, or in one of our databases is a great place to start writing up your references. But be aware that because the information is machine generated, it may not necessarily be correct. Always check your citations against our style sheets on the writing and citing guide!
A list of sources used for research. Sometimes referred to as "References" or "Works Cited". Usually added to the end of a research document, it will follow the style format of the rest of the paper. (i.e. APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian)
A list of citations accompanied by summaries and evaluation of the sources. For more information on Annotated Bibliographies check out the OWL Purdue website.
Taking someone else's work or ideas and presenting them as your own original work. Plagiarism is a violation of BRCC's academic honor code. Use of Artificial Intelligence software may also qualify as plagiarism, so please check with your instructor before making use of any AI tools.
Click the image to go to the MLA style page on our Writing & Citing guide.
Click the image to go to the APA style page on our Writing & Citing guide.
Click on the image to go to the Chicago/Turabian style page on our Writing & Citing guide.
All scholarly work (and yes, this includes your term papers), owes something to previous work. Citing our sources when we write is an agreed-upon way to acknowledge the people who have helped us shape our ideas, or argue our points. It is required because failing to cite our sources properly (intentionally or accidentally) is passing off others' ideas as our own. This is stealing or plagiarism.
You need to cite any time you use or refer to others' work. This could be their concepts, theories, ideas, as well as words, publications, speeches, presentations, statistics, etc. This also includes artistic material. You must cite music, art, movies, etc. Here are just some of the things you must cite:
Each citation style may ask you to represent information in specific ways. We have created the Writing & Citing Guide to assist with using the different citation styles.
The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) has been an exceptional resource for all things writing and citing for years. They have great information on all three formatting styles, and provide sample papers to see how formatting and citations look in practice. Below are links to their various style pages, as well as more information on plagiarism.
Plagiarism