Public Administration

The two main reasons for citing your sources are:

1.  To properly credit another scholar's work (and avoid plagiarism).
2.  Allow the next researcher to track down the material you used in your paper. 

In order to do this you must cite the specific work you used.  That is cite to a specific journal article, chapter in a book, a specific page at a website. With a few limited exceptions you would never cite a database e.g. JSTOR, or Project Muse. Instead, you cite the article by title and author, the journal it is found in by title, volume number, and date and then note the database it was found in and the date you accessed the information. The exception to this a database that produces information on the fly. For example: if you generate a table of data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators databank, you would note that as the source since it is not possible to point to a specific item.

Use these guides to help you format your citations and your papers appropriately:

A citation manager is a software that will assist you in creating and managing citations for the articles you use in your research. Some of the software will also store the articles you find.

You may want to consider using a citation manager as you conduct your research to save the resources you find and quickly access and cite them as you write your assignments. 

View the various guides for each manager from the links below. 

Key to formatting a citation correctly or locating an item you see referenced in a bibliography is recognizing the type of material you are working with. Is it a journal article? A book? A chapter in a book?

The following links will help you understand the parts of a citation. Additionally, if you are reviewing a bibliography, knowing how to tell the type of source from its formatting will help you locate the item using the appropriate library resource.