Citing sources
Go directly to the guides and manuals section for using the citation styles.
Why cite sources?
Citations provide the information necessary for identifying the sources consulted when you write an article or a book or prepare a presentation.
A source is cited every time a portion of a text by another author is reproduced in its entirety, in this case duly encased in quotation marks, or else reference is made to a certain theory of an author, reprocessing it in a different way via a synthesis or a paraphrase. Special sources such as interviews, multimedial recordings, web sources, lecture notes, manuscripts, communications, primary research data or any other external source must also be duly cited. The sum total of the sources used constitutes the backbone of a scientific paper and goes into the final bibliography.
In the drafting of academic and scientific texts, correct citing of the sources consulted, giving credit to the author or authors, is a fundamentally important aspect, both to enable readers to locate the cited work in a clear and unambiguous way and to identify the type of document consulted (monograph, journal article, thesis, web site, etc.), and to lend solidity and accuracy to your work but also to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
The bibliographical apparatus of a scientific paper is made up of the citations present within the text, subsequently referred to in an organised and detailed fashion in the final bibliography.
Citation Style coverage by subject area
The citation style is a standardised set of rules to be utilised in the drafting of scientific texts, making for a correct and orderly organisation of the information contained in a bibliographical citation.
There exist various citational styles, each traditionally associated with specific discipline areas, which give rise to the formal characteristics of the citation: order and choice of elements to be used (author, title, publisher, date, number of pages), formatting and punctuation.
There follows a brief overview of the main citational styles and their related discipline areas of use:
- American Psychological Association (APA) - subject areas: Psychology and Social Sciences.
- Associazione Italiana Biblioteche (AIB) Studi - subject area: Humanities.
- the Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS) - covers various subject areas, depending on the style:
- the Author-Date style: tailored for Physics, Life Sciences and Social Sciences.
- the Notes style: tailored for Historical studies and the Humanities. - Chicago / Turabian Manual of Style - a synthetic version of the CMoS geared mainly to students.
- Council of Science Editors (CSE) Manual - subject areas: Science, Tech, Engineering & Math (STEM)
- Harvard Format Citation Guide - subject areas: Human Sciences, Natural sciences and Social sciences.
- Modern Language Association (MLA) - subject area: Humanities.
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) - subject areas: Computer science and Electronic Engineering.
- Nature - subject areas: Pure and Applied Sciences.
SEARCH, the catalogue of the SNS Library, enables the exportation of bibliographical references of resources found using four different styles: Modern Language Association style (MLA, ed. 7. and 8.), American Psychological Association (APA), Chicago Turabian Manual of Style (CmoS/Turabian) and Harvard referencing citation format.
Online guides, manuals, and tutorials
American Psychological Association
This guide on the APA site provides examples of reference practices for a wide range of resource types, including non-textual materials (such as audiovisual content and datasets). You will also find guidance on how to cite a reference within the body of the text.
Print access: SNS Library users can consult the complete print copy of the 7th edition directly in our collection.
[Associazione Italiana Biblioteche] - Norme per le citazioni bibliografiche e la bibliografia finale (Rules for bibliographical citations and the final bibliography)
Reference pages on the AIB WEB portal, complete with examples of use of the Associazione Italiana Biblioteche (Italian Library Ass.) style; it also includes indications and examples of reference of the archival sources.
Chicago Manual of Style (standard) [CMoS]
On the CMoS website (curated by the Chicago University Press), this Quick Guide provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of the two primary CMoS reference models: the Author-Date style, tailored for Physics, Life Sciences and Social Sciences and the Notes style, tailored for Historical studies and the Humanities. While both systems include similar core bibliographic details, they differ in publication date placement, punctuation rules, and in-text citation formatting:
- the Notes style, presents the date in varying positions according to the type of resource, though it generally appears after the name of the publisher (for books) or following the journal issue information (for articles); references are indicated through footnotes or endnotes (typically placed at the bottom of the page or at the end of a chapter).
- in the Author-Date style, the year of publication is placed immediately after the first element, usually the name of the author(s); references are cited briefly in the text, within parentheses.
This supplementary guide from the Library System of the University of Bologna is also a valuable resource for researchers, offering extensive examples across a wide range of source types.
Print access: SNS Library users can consult the complete print copy of the 17th edition (2017) of the CMoS directly in our collection.
CSE Manual Online - Citation quick guide
A streamlined, example-rich guide to this manual tailored to the STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering & Math) scientific community. It places special emphasis on information resources typical of this domain: Journal articles; Conference papers & proceedings; Technical reports; Patents; Databases & datasets; Websites, blogs & social media; Audiovisual resources; Legislative sources; Personal communications; Grey literature. The manual’s authoritative authors (The Council of Science Editors, an international membership organization for editorial professionals publishing in the sciences) offer three distinct citation styles: Citation-Sequence (recommended), Name-Year, and Citation-Name. The proposed formatting model for the reference list is based on that of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), which in turn is inspired by the ISO 690:2021 standard.
Print access: SNS Library users can consult the complete print copy of the 9th edition (2024) of the CSE Manual directly in our collection.
Harvard Format Citation Guide
Complete guide available free of charge at the Mendeley site.
Harvard Reference Quick Guide
An easy online guide curated by the Dundalk Institute of Technology (Ireland).
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Reference Guide
A guide focussing on the types of source particularly searched in the scientific field of reference: datasets, conference proceedings, patents and lectures.
Modern Language Association Citation 8 guide
This guide in English, with its wealth of examples for various types of source, is available free of charge on the Mendeley site and refers to the eighth edition (2016) of the MLA style manual.
MLA Style Center
The Modern Language Association makes freely available on its portal the FAQs on the use of its citational style and a synthetic guide: Works Cited: A Quick Guide, with examples.
Nature Referencing Guide
A complete guide that demonstrates how to cite many types of sources in the authoritative journal Nature: books, YouTube videos, websites, articles, journals, podcasts, images, videos, or music.
Open University Classical Studies guide to referencing
Compiled by a British research university specialising in distance teaching, this online guide can be useful to antiquarians for the citation, in a correct way but limited to the citations within the text, of primary sources of antiquity (texts, artifacts, artworks, coins, inscriptions and papyri).
University of Pittsburgh - Courses & subject guides - Citation Styles
This complete guide of examples contains the citational styles most widely used in the academic context: APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, IEEE.
Western Sidney University Harvard Reference Style Guide
A complete guide on the Harvard style in text format.
Other related resources available in the Library or accessible on the SNS network:
Harvey Gordon, Writing with sources : a guide for students. Third ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017. <https://tinyurl.com/mwhen82m>
(eBooks with reserved access on the SNS network)
Paintings, letters, video clips, radio recordings, blog items, reviews of a discontinued journal or the statistical data recorded by a seismic detector: these are all examples of sources. How can you manage them in your publication? This e-book by Gordon Harvey, distinguishing between primary sources (factual data) and secondary ones (ideal data), explains how to assess the reliability of a source and how to manage it in your publication so as to increase its authority. The appendix includes many examples for citing a source using differing styles (MLA, Chicago, APA and others).
Pensato Rino, Corso di bibliografia: guida alla compilazione e all'uso dei repertori bibliografici. Milano: Editrice bibliografica, 1987
This manual (in Italian) arose out of a university bibliography course given by the author and thus it is directed first and foremost to students of disciplines of the book who will find in it theoretical and technical-methodological references; however, the paragraphs dedicated to the choice and limitation of the subject, title search, citation style, annotation, organisation and methods of ordering may be of use to a wider public.
Revelli Carlo, La citazione bibliografica. Roma: AIB, 2010
A synthetic publication (in Italian) dealing with the elements useful for the construction of a solid and coherent bibliographical apparatus: the footnote, the elements of the bibliographical citation, the succession of the elements in the bibliographical citation, the ordering of the bibliographical citations, the author-date citations and the digital documents. With examples.
Turabian Kate L., A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations: Chicago Style for students and researchers. 9 ed. Revised by Wayne C. Booth ... [et al.]. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018
In the Reference Room of the Orologio-Carovana site in Pisa there is a copy of the ninth edition of this extremely widely used manual, known simply as "Turabian". Based on the Chicago style, it simplifies the structure thereof, and is mainly aimed at satisfying the needs of university students, who, after a section dedicated to the writing of a scientific text, can find the pages dedicated to the Turabian citational style. Two styles are presented: Notes bibliography, more widely used in the field of the human and social sciences, and Author-date, in which the more prominent position given to the date of publication of the research is more suitable for the demands of the pure and applied sciences. Examples relating to the modalities of citations in the text, the ordering of the elements and the structure of the final bibliography are provided for various types of source, with particular attention devoted to online resources and the new media.