The purpose of citation is to:
- acknowledge the scholarly work that you are using,
- give credit to authors of that work,
- allow your reader to find your source to study in depth, and
- avoid accusations of plagiarism.
Style encompasses everything about how a paper is formatted, including in-text referencing and final list of references.
Every citation style will include some version of the following:
- For articles:
- Title of the article
- Author(s) of the article
- Title of the publication in which the article appears
- Volume number, issue number, and inclusive pages.
- Year of publication
- For books:
- Author(s) or editor(s) of the book
- Title of the book
- Year of publication
- Publisher and city of publication
- Conference proceedings, presentations, government documents, and other sources can be more complex.
The basic idea to remember is who did what when and where.