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PMA08-1 Anatomy & Physiology: Citing Your Sources

Library content for Anatomy and Physiology

What is a Citation and Citation Style?

What is a citation and citation style?

A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and combat plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author's name, date, location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifer).

A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting.

How to do I choose a citation style?

There are many different ways of citing resources from your research. The citation style sometimes depends on the academic discipline involved. For example:

  • APA (American Psychological Association) is used by Education, Psychology, and Sciences
  • MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities
  • Chicago/Turabian style is generally used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts

*You will need to consult with your Instructor to determine what is required in your specific course.

Paper Setup

APA

  • APA now has different title page requirements for student papers. This title page does not require a running head and has a different set of information to include. See APA Style: Student Title Page Guide.
  • Titles of papers are now bolded, with a blank line before the author's name.
  • There is no font requirement as long as the font is legible and consistent.
  • The heading for the References list is now bolded.
  • There are now guidelines for annotated bibliographies.

MLA

  • 1 inch margins
  • Times New Roman 12 pt
  • Beginning one inch from the top of the first page and flush with the left margin, type your name, your instructor’s name (or instructors’ names, if there is more than one instructor), the course number, and the date on separate lines, double-spacing the lines. Months may be spelled out or abbreviated. 
  • Number all pages consecutively throughout the research paper in the upper right-hand corner, half an inch from the top and flush with the right margin. Type your last name, followed by a space, before the page number

Plagiarism Checkers

Plagiarism Checkers

Plagiarism checkers are software that can be used to cross-check text for duplicated content (this may include quoted material, paraphrased material, similarities in wording, etc.). These tools help to ensure that writing is original and correctly cited.

Plagiarism is often unintentional--you may not realize that you have accidentally plagiarized so using a plagiarism checker can help determine if and where plagiarism may have occurred so it can be corrected.

The following are some examples of plagiarism checkers:

  • Turnitin: TurnItIn is a plagiarism checker used by SNHU that matches submitted work against a national database of other college assignments, database research sources, and web sources. TurnItIn is only visible to instructors; if it is being used in your course, you can ask your instructor for a copy of your report, which will be generated as soon as you submit your paper for grading.
  • Grammarly: A free online plagiarism checker that can also assist with grammar and proofreading.
  • EasyBib Plagiarism and Grammar Checker: Paste or upload your paper and get suggestions on grammar and style. Directly add citations you missed.
  • Duplichecker: Copy & Paste or upload your file. Each sentence is reviewed and source content websites are displayed.
  • Quetext: Analyzed by lexical frequencies, phrase patterns and other factors. Then your text is mapped into an internal network compared to tthe internet and other databases.

Additionally, a simple Google search can oftentimes detect plagiarism. Instructors can just put a sentence or two of a student's paper into Google and see if there are any matches.

Citation Management

There are many tools for importing citations from sources like article databases and automatically integrating them into your research paper and bibliography. Some examples are:

Quick Tip Videos

Additional Citation Help