Evaluate Your Sources

When deciding whether or not to rely on a source to inform your project, be careful to reconstruct the context necessary to read, view, or listen to its information effectively.

  • SIFT: The Four Moves
    Four things to do (i.e., moves) when looking at a source: Stop, Investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace the original context. Read the linked page for helpful specifics.
  • Evaluating Sources (courtesy of Williams College Libraries)

For example, when selecting scholarly journal articles, limit to peer reviewed publications. Notice and investigate a book's publisher. Find out more about the authors whose work you're reading; what else have they written?

Cite Your Sources

Manuals of style, commonly referred to as citation manuals or style manuals, are invaluable not only because they prescribe the proper format for source documentation and citation, but because they recommend the latest best practices for writing in your field of study, from proper punctuation to preferred terminology to accepted discourse conventions; ignore their advice at your peril. Following are the styles used most commonly at Harvard.

MLA STYLE

CITATION TOOLS

Harvard Library supports a selection of citation tools that allow you to:

  • create a searchable database of the books, articles, book chapters, and more that you're using in your research
  • import citations, abstracts, and more from online sources
  • organize notes and full text documents, such as PDFs, images, spreadsheets
  • share references when you're working on collaborative projects
  • create reference lists in Chicago, MLA, APA and hundreds of other formats

Citations Tools we support include Zotero (see below), EndNote, Overleaf Pro+, and Sciwheel.

To learn more about each tool, how they compare to one another, and for a list of upcoming classes, visit:

Zotero is a free tool that you can add to either Chrome or Firefox. Once you have Zotero installed, you can use it to organize, keep track of, and annotate your sources. You can find the Harvard Library Zotero installation guide here. The Harvard Library also offers workshops to teach you how to set up and use Zotero for gathering and organizing your sources. If you don’t have Zotero installed to manage your sources, you can use their citation generator, Zoterobib, to create citations for individual sources. When you use citation generators, it’s important to remember that the machine-generated citations are only as accurate as the information you put into them. You should always check your citations to make sure they are correctly formatted.

TRACES: A Framework for Thinking About Citation

Properly documenting one’s sources is an intellectual practice that reveals the interlocutors in a scholarly conversation, facilitates dialogue within and across disciplines, and traces the evolution of ideas and knowledge over time. The following principles clarify how conscientious citation practices contribute to the integrity of a scholarly conversation and your voice within it.

Transparency

Providing citations supports transparency in your scholarship. Your audience will expect that you have faithfully represented the work of cited authors, and the presence of citations not only allows them to find those sources for themselves, but also consult them and consider whether or not you have incorporated them accurately. In this way, citations can reduce the perpetuation of misunderstandings and false or exaggerated claims.

Responsiveness 

At least as far back as 1906, with the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, academic publishers anticipated that citation guidelines would need to accommodate idiosyncrasies and innovations; in their words, “Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.” In other words, citation styles offer scholars some measure of flexibility. Likewise, citation guidelines must accommodate changes in technology and scholarly practice—thus, the many editions of manuals published over the years: we now have a 7th edition of the APA, an 8th edition of the MLA, and a 16th edition of Chicago. Today’s digital world has given us new communication forms and these are often sources for research. Consider, for example, the important role that social media has played in the unfolding of so many local and world events. Citation styles aim to structure and codify, but their value also lies in their adaptability to special cases and emerging knowledge forms.  

Access

Citing the sources you consulted allows your readers to discover and access materials of import to your argument that may be useful for their own research in a related area. Likewise, your ability to read and interpret a broad spectrum of citations across formats and time periods facilitates your own discovery of research materials. Understanding that citations are like breadcrumbs will set you on the right path to problem-solving should you encounter a citation in an older source that exhibits long-obsolete stylistic conventions.

Credit and credibility

Finding your voice as a student and scholar requires distinguishing your intellectual work from that of others who have informed your thinking. Learning how to ethically and skillfully cite sources facilitates this endeavor by demarcating the line between your arguments and related ideas, while simultaneously recognizing all contributors. Just as important, good citation habits afford you the rhetorical power to clearly and respectfully position yourself relative to cited authors. You may choose to refute their logic or use their arguments as evidence to support your thesis, but regardless of how you incorporate others’ work, documentation helps legitimize your arguments by demonstrating that you have already examined the existing research on a given subject and are working in relation to that body of knowledge.

Economy

Citations save space by concisely conveying essential information about cited items in an understandable format. This elegance allows them to appear in texts without distracting readers from the flow of an argument. Readers can choose to attend to relevant citation information as needed.

Standardization

Citation styles each have their own guidelines about how to structure citations, depending on what information is most important for the discipline that established the style. For example, the prominence of dates in APA style citations reveals the importance of currency to the field of psychology. Because different fields tend to endorse a particular citation style, citing something in the preferred style makes it easier for researchers in the corresponding discipline to understand what you have cited. Much like mailing addresses on packages help the post office know where to deliver items, citations act as wayfinding tools. Though mailing addresses from various countries may be structured in different ways, they all convey the same basic information. So too, different citation styles employ distinct structures and elements to convey information about where an item came from, but in a standardized fashion that can be parsed across disciplines.