PS 135: American Public Policy: Citing Sources

It is very important to cite your sources in a consistent style. This shows that you have engaged other thinkers and built on previous research. It also gives your readers a direct pathway back to your original sources.

Because your readers need to be able to see what it is you are citing, it is important to follow a consistent style throughout your paper.

For this course (and in many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences), you have been asked to use the style guidelines established in the Chicago Manual of Style.

You can (and should) use three strategies for making sure that your citations are complete and correct:

1. Consult the CMS guide on the library web page
2. Use RefWorks to gather your sources and create your bibliography. If you download an add-on called Write-N-Cite, you can even pull from your library and generate in-text citations or footnotes/endnotes and automatically generate a works cited list.
3. Purdue OWLs. Use a search engine such as Google and search for the kind of source that you want to cite. For instance, if I wanted to cite a book chapter, I would search: purdue owl chicago book chapter. I could also go directly to the page for CMS 16th ed. and navigate to the books section.

RefWorks is web-based tool that allows you to:

♦ systematically organize citations
♦ easily include citations in your paper
♦ build a bibliography using specific styles (Chicago, MLA, etc.)
♦ import references from many databases and library catalogs

Login to Refworks

For more on learning RefWorks, check out the library's Refworks Guide.