One thing that stumps most writers trying to eke out a living in the field of academic writing is the plethora of citation styles available. One only has to google “citation style” and out will come all these weird acronyms and terms that seem more suited to aged librarians than modern writers.

Rest assured, however, that these styles are lot less complicated than they seem.

I never had a problem with citation styles simply because I took up a course in college that would put a little too much emphasis on doing research and using the proper citation. My professors waged war against plagiarism, and any “attempt” on our part — be it intentional or a rather unfortunate slip — would merit serious punishment. I took up Asian Studies, by the way, which pretty much translates to “we eat term papers for breakfast, lunch and dinner”.

In our field of study, papers with a required minimum of thirty pages are the norm. We won’t even sweat it out.

Anyway, it was during my college years that I was exposed to citation styles such MLA and Turabian. These are the styles commonly used in the field of humanities. APA, also a popular citation style, is used mainly by the sciences.

Why is learning these citation styles important? One of the biggest and most lucrative fields in freelance writing today is academic/essay writing. As I mentioned before, I’m now working for Custom Papers, and the pay has been very good and generous so far. In 2005, I funded my mom’s leisure trip to Thailand with money earned from academic writing.

More importantly, I’m a nerd, and writing term papers makes me happy. I’d like to share that nerdiness with you.

Since this is a rather difficult topic, I have decided to discuss it in parts. Today, we will go through an overview of four of the more famous citation styles. This will be more on the fundamental differences of the citation styles, particularly their use in specific fields of study.

Chicago/Turabian

This is one of the oldest citation formats available. Initially known as the Chicago style, it earned the name “Turabian” after Kate Turabian wrote a comprehensive guide to using this citation style. It is commonly used in the fields of history, art, music and theology. This is actually my favorite citation style, though it requires more work than styles like MLA and APA. Whereas MLA and APA use inline citation, Chicago/Turabian uses the footnote/endnote to identify its source.

Since each footnote is written in a format reminiscent of a bibliographical entry, a lot of writers and academics have dismissed the Turabian as repetitive, tiring and old-fashioned. I, however, prefer this style because it makes it so much easier to identify and find the source of your quotation when the need arises, thanks to all the information it packs into every footnote or endnote.

MLA

Also known as the “Modern Language Association” Style, this citation style was created initially for use in the fields of English, literature and language studies. However, its ease of use and popularity has made it quite the common citation style of choice for most humanities courses and fields of study. It uses an in-text citation in the format of “(Last Name of Author Page)”, placed at the end of the quoted or paraphrased text. Simpler and a lot easier on the eyes, the MLA is one of the most prevalent styles used in academic writing today.

APA

This style was created by the American Psychological Association, and is used commonly in the field of science. Some social sciences also prefer this method of citation. It is quite similar to the Harvard style, thanks to its “(Last Name of Author, Year, Page)” format. Like both the MLA and Harvard styles, the citation is in-text and appears at the end of the cited or paraphrased line. Unlike MLA, however, its bibliographical list is entitled “References” rather than “Works Cited”. Due to its simplicity, the APA is also one of the more popular citation styles used today.

Harvard

The Harvard style is used more commonly in the United Kingdom. It is also known as the “author-date” reference style, due to its “(Last Name of Author, Year, Page)” format. Like the APA style, noting the page of the source can be omitted, particularly if the citation spans quite a large area of the source. This is the preferred citation style of the British Standards Institution. Weirdly enough, the Harvard citation style is hardly used in Harvard University.

These are only the basic differences of the four citation styles. They differ vastly in in-text citations and in their bibliographical presentations. More importantly, each style has its own idiosycrasies when it comes to citing different types of sources (e.g. books, non-print sources, journals, interviews, etc.). It’ll take a few days to get a better feel of this, so I’ll take some time discussing it.

XOXO,