Can introductions have citations

You can follow a basic pattern recipe for writing introduction paragraphs to help you get started. Try to write your introduction straight from your question analysis, then review it many times while you are writing the body of the essay—this will help you to keep your essay on target i.

Note that most introductions generally only include references if definitions are taken from an information source. The introduction to an essay is rather like a formal social introduction: How do you do! For example, if an ASO consultant comes to a lecture to do a guest presentation, it would be good practice to be introduced in a meaningful way:. This is Mary Bloggs who is a consultant from the Academic Skills office relevant info about the person for the job about to be done.

Good question analysis is critical to the success of your assignment essay, so it is important that you learn a process for analysing a question statement of purpose. Mary will work with you on analysis of the question you will be answering in your assignment and will show you how to develop an essay plan from your question a statement about what will be happening in the next hour.

An introductory paragraph is very much tied to the question that has been set see Question analysis workshop , and we use special terms to describe each stage of the introduction. Click or hover over the introductory paragraph below to see an analysis of its structure, and how the introduction matches the set question. It begins with the broadest topic sentence 1.

Then, it narrows to the thesis statement or the part of the topic that will be specifically addressed in the essay sentence 2. The last sentence of the paragraph usually outlines the main points that will be covered in the essay sentence 3. Essentially, you are recognizing that your research and scholarship builds upon the work and the ideas of many others who came before you.

The result is that citation helps readers see the connections between books and articles published by many different authors There are many different styles of citation, established by various academic and professional organizations. Most styles involve a two part process.

First, you acknowledge a source with a brief notation after you use it in the body of your paper. At times, you may provide more than one citation in a parenthetical reference, such as when you are discussing related works or studies with similar results. List the citations in the same order they appear in your references section, and separate the citations with a semicolon.

Both of these researchers authored works that support the point being made in this sentence, so it makes sense to include both in the same citation. In some cases, you may need to cite an extremely well-known work that has been repeatedly republished or translated.

Many works of literature and sacred texts, as well as some classic nonfiction texts, fall into this category. For these works, the original date of publication may be unavailable. If so, include the year of publication or translation for your edition. Refer to specific parts or chapters if you need to cite a specific section. Discuss with your instructor whether he or she would like you to cite page numbers in this particular instance.

In this example, the student is citing a classic work of psychology, originally written in German and later translated to English. To cite an introduction, foreword, preface, or afterword, cite the author of the material and the year, following the same format used for other print materials. Whenever possible, cite electronic sources as you would print sources, using the author, the date, and where appropriate, a page number.

For some types of electronic sources—for instance, many online articles—this information is easily available. Other times, however, you will need to vary the format to reflect the differences in online media. If an online source has no page numbers but you want to refer to a specific portion of the source, try to locate other information you can use to direct your reader to the information cited.

Some websites number paragraphs within published articles; if so, include the paragraph number in your citation. Precede the paragraph number with the abbreviation for the word paragraph and the number of the paragraph e. Even if a source does not have numbered paragraphs, it is likely to have headings that organize the content.

In your citation, name the section where your cited information appears, followed by a paragraph number. This student cited the appropriate section heading within the website and then counted to find the specific paragraph where the cited information was located. If an online source has no listed author and no date, use the source title and the abbreviation n.

For personal communications, such as interviews, letters, and emails, cite the name of the person involved, clarify that the material is from a personal communication, and provide the specific date the communication took place. Note that while in-text citations correspond to entries in the references section, personal communications are an exception to this rule. They are cited only in the body text of your paper.

Yardley, M. At work, you may sometimes share information resources with your colleagues by photocopying an interesting article or forwarding the URL of a useful website. Your goal in these situations and in formal research citations is the same: to provide enough information to help your professional peers locate and follow up on potentially useful information.

Provide as much specific information as possible to achieve that goal, and consult with your supervisor or professor as to what specific style he or she may prefer. The brief citations included in the body of your paper correspond to the more detailed citations provided at the end of the paper in the references section.

In-text citations are necessary within your writing to show where you have borrowed ideas or quoted directly from another author. These are kept short because you do not want to disrupt the flow of your writing and distract the reader. While the in-text citation is very important, it is not enough to enable yourreaders to locate that source if they would like to use it for their own research.

The references section of your essay may consist of a single page for a brief research paper or may extend for many pages in professional journal articles. This section provides detailed information about how to create the references section of your paper. You will review basic formatting guidelines and learn how to format bibliographical entries for various types of sources. As you create this section of your paper, follow the guidelines provided here. To set up your references section, use the insert page break feature of your word processing program to begin a new page.

Note that the header and margins will be the same as in the body of your paper, and pagination will continue from the body of your paper. In other words, if you set up the body of your paper correctly, the correct header and page number should appear automatically in your references section.

For magazine and journal articles, the volume number, issue number, and pages where the article appears. Before you start compiling your own references and translating referencing information from possibly other styles into APA style, you need to be able to identify each piece of information in the reference. This can sometimes be challenging because the different styles format the information differently and may put it in different places within the reference.

However, the types of information each of the referencing styles requires is generally the same. Once you find the referencing format you need in the guide, you can study the example and follow the structure to set up your own citations. The style guide also provides examples for how to do the in-text citation for quotes and paraphrasing from that type of source.

You may be asking yourself why you cannot just use the reference that is often provided on the first page of the source like a journal article , but you need to remember that not all authors use APA style referencing, or even if they do, they may not use the exact formatting you need to follow.

Putting together a references page becomes a lot easier once you recognize the types of information you continually see in references. For example, anytime you see something italicized for APA or underlined in MLA , you know it is the title of the major piece of writing, such as a book with chapters or an academic journal with multiple articles. Take a look at the examples below.

If you are sourcing a chapter from a book, do not italicize the title of the chapter; instead, use double quotes. You also need to include the pages of the chapter within the book. You do italicize the title of the book, similar to the journal article example above. The following box provides general guidelines for formatting the reference page. For the remainder of this chapter, you will learn about how to format reference entries for different source types, including multi-author and electronic sources.

Include the heading References, centred at the top of the page. The heading should not be boldfaced, italicized, or underlined. Use hanging indentation for each entry. The first line should be flush with the left margin, while any lines that follow should be indented five spaces. Hanging indentation is the opposite of normal indenting rules for paragraphs. For a work with multiple authors, use the last name of the first author listed.

Use sentence case for all other titles—books, articles, web pages, and other source titles. Capitalize the first word of the title. Do not capitalize any other words in the title except for the following:.

Use italics for book and journal titles. Do not use italics, underlining, or quotation marks for titles of shorter works, such as articles. There are many word processing programs and websites available that allow you to just plug in your referencing information and it will format it to the style required. If you decide to use such a program, you must still check all your references against your referencing guide because the way those programs and sites piece the information together may not be the exact way you are expected to do so at your school.

Always double check! If you need to consult outside sources to research a document you are creating, follow the general guidelines already discussed, as well as any industry-specific citation guidelines. As is the case for in-text citations, formatting reference entries becomes more complicated when you are citing a source with multiple authors, various types of online media, or sources for which you must provide additional information beyond the basics listed in the general guidelines.

The following sections show how to format reference entries by type of source. For book-length sources and shorter works that appear in a book, follow the guidelines that best describe your source. Campbell, D. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Myers, C. Note that when the editor is listed after the title, you list the initials before the last name.

This is different from an anthology, which is a collection of articles or essays by different authors. For citing works in anthologies, see the guidelines later in this section. Freud, S. New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis J. Strachey, Trans. New York, NY: W. Original work published If you are using any edition other than the first, include the edition number in parentheses after the title.

List the name of the author s who wrote the chapter, followed by the chapter title. Follow the same process you would use to cite a book chapter, substituting the article or essay title for the chapter title. If the book lists the name of the editor s , include it in your citation. Indicate the volume number if applicable and page numbers in parentheses after the article title. Swedan, N.

Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers. New York, NY: Perigee. Carroll, D. Managing type II diabetes. Chicago, IL: Southwick Press. Gestational diabetes. American Psychiatric Association. Treat these as you would a book published by a non-governmental organization, but be aware that these works may have an identification number listed.

If so, include the number in parentheses after the publication year. Census Bureau. The decennial censuses from to Publication No.

DeMarco, R. Journal of Nursing Education, 49 5 , 1—4. In journals, page numbers are continuous across all the issues in a particular volume. For instance, the winter issue may begin with page 1, and in the spring issue that follows, the page numbers pick up where the previous issue left off. If you have ever wondered why a print journal did not begin on page 1, or wondered why the page numbers of a journal extend into four digits, this is why.

Omit the issue number from your reference entry. Wagner, J. Rethinking school lunches: A review of recent literature. At times you may need to cite an abstract —the summary that appears at the beginning of a published article.

If you are citing the abstract only, and it was published separately from the article, provide the following information:. Information about where the abstract was published for instance, another journal or a collection of abstracts. Use an ampersand before the last name listed.

Barker, E. Global self-esteem, appearance satisfaction, and self-reported dieting in early adolescence. Journal of Early Adolescence, 30 2 , — Tremblay, M. Health Reports, 21 1 , 7— The article in the following example has 16 listed authors; the reference entry lists the first six authors and the 16th, omitting the seventh through the 15th.

The idea of an eight-page article with 16 authors may seem strange to you—especially if you are in the midst of writing a page research paper on your own. More often than not, articles in scholarly journals list multiple authors. Sometimes, the authors actually did collaborate on writing and editing the published article.

In other instances, some of the authors listed may have contributed to the research in some way while being only minimally involved in the process of writing the article. After the publication year, list the issue date. Otherwise, magazine articles as you would journal articles. List the volume and issue number if both are available.

Treat newspaper articles as you would magazine and journal articles, with one important difference: precede the page number s with the abbreviation p. For articles that have non-continuous pagination, list all the pages included in the article.

For example, an article that begins on page A1 and continues on pages A4 would have the page reference A1, A4. Jones, J. Food police in our schools [Letter to the editor]. Rockwood Gazette, p. After the title, indicate in brackets that the work is a review and state the name of the work being reviewed. Note that even if the title of the review is the same as the title of the book being reviewed, as in the following example, you should treat it as an article title.

Do not italicize it. Whenever you cite online sources, it is important to provide the most up-to-date information available to help readers locate the source. The letters URL stand for uniform resource locator. Always provide the most complete URL possible. As you likely know, web addresses are not always stable. If a website is updated or reorganized, the article you accessed in April may move to a different location in May. The URL you provided may become a dead link. For this reason, many online periodicals, especially scholarly publications, now rely on DOIs rather than URLs to keep track of articles.

A DOI is a digital object identifier—an identification code provided for some online documents, typically articles in scholarly journals. Like a URL, its purpose is to help readers locate an article. Follow these guidelines:. If the article appears in print as well as online, you do not need to provide the URL.

However, include the words e lectronic version after the title in brackets. In all other respects, treat the article as you would a print article. Include the volume number and issue number if available. Note, however, that these may not be available for some online periodicals. Bell, J. Low-carb beats low-fat diet for early losses but not long term.

List the URL. Include the volume and issue number for the periodical if this information is available. For some online periodicals, it may not be. Note that if the article appears in a print version of the publication, you do not need to list the URL, but do indicate that you accessed the electronic version. Robbins, K.

Psychology Today, 43 2 , McNeil, D. Maternal health: A new study challenges benefits of vitamin A for women and babies. The New York Times. Cite articles accessed through a database the same way you would normally cite a print article. Provide database information only if the article is difficult to locate. APA style does not require the item number or accession number for articles retrieved from databases. You may choose to include it if the article is difficult to locate or the database is an obscure one.

Check with your instructor for specific requirements for your course. Format article abstracts as you would an article citation, but add the word Abstract in brackets after the title. Bradley, U. Low-fat versus low-carbohydrate weight reduction diets: Effects on weight loss, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular risk: A randomized control trial [Abstract].

Diabetes , 58 12 , — The ways you cite different nonperiodical web documents may vary slightly from source to source, depending on the information available. In your citation, include as much of the following information as you can:. If the document consists of more than one web page within the site, link to the homepage or the entry page for the document.

American Heart Association. Heart attack, stroke, and cardiac arrest warning signs. Provide the URL for the specific entry. When citing graphic data—such as maps, pie charts, bar graphs, and so on—include the name of the organization that compiled the information, along with the publication date.

Briefly describe the contents in brackets. Provide the URL where you retrieved the information. If the graphic is associated with a specific project or document, list it after your bracketed description of the contents. US Food and Drug Administration. Electronic books may include books available as text files online or audiobooks.

If an electronic book is easily available in print, cite it as you would a print source. If it is unavailable in print or extremely difficult to find , use the format in the example. Use the words Available from in your citation if the book must be purchased or is not available directly.

Chisholm, L. Celtic tales. Chapters and sections from online books or web documents are treated similarly to their print counterparts with the addition of retrieval information. Include the chapter or section number in parentheses after the book title. Hart, A. Restoratives—Coffee, cocoa, chocolate. In Diet in sickness and in health VI. Provide the author, date of publication, title, and retrieval information. If the work is numbered within the database, include the number in parentheses at the end of the citation.

For commonly used office software and programming languages, it is not necessary to provide a citation. Cite software only when you are using a specialized program, such as the nutrition tracking software in the following example.