How to Reference an Essay

Learn how to reference essays properly

When you are writing an essay, you should always quote some bibliography. The best thing you can do is include as many texts, documents and testimonies, as you can, in order to show the examiner your commitment to your investigation. Do not constraint yourself to one or two authors.
Of course, you must always quote the used bibliography. It is vital that you, as a student, learn how to reference an essay in an appropriate way. The essay writer must copy literally every single quote, always mentioning the author, their work, the publisher and the year, as well as the page where they took the quote from. Quotation marks are mandatory, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism. Here we show you how to reference essays every time, according to the rules set by the American Psychological Association for documenting sources used in a research paper. APA citation style requires both in-text citations and a reference list.

Referencing books

One of the most common sources to reference in your essay are books. The format of these references is the following: first comes the author’s name (or the authors, if there is more than one), the year of publication, then the title of the book in italics, the place where it was published and the publisher. For example: Kilgour, Maggie (1995) The Rise of the Gothic Novel, New York: Routledge.

Referencing journal articles

If you must learn how to reference an essay properly, we can’t skip this section on how to reference articles, since many times students quote journals, magazines and newspapers as part of their research work. When you are listing a journal article, you must provide the readers the name of the author(s), the year the article was published, the title of the actual journal article, then the name of the journal and volume number in italics (or underlined), and finally the pages the articles is on.

Referencing electronic sources

When we discuss referencing electronic sources, we mean sources that have been found or retrieved through computer, as web pages, CD-Roms or even e-mails. The most common type of electronic source is a web-page. There is a difference in quoting a whole web site (in which you provide the URL) and a specific web-page within the site. Then you should provide, first, the title of the page and date of publication, followed by the organization responsible for the page, the date when you looked at the page and finally the web address.

Add a reference section

At the end of your essay, you should include a reference section: that is, a list of all the sources quoted or referenced in the essay. Arrange the list alphabetically by author’s surnames. Remember to follow the given directions on how to reference essays with different types of sources, such as books, newspaper articles or electronic sources. If the article was written by more that one author, give the authors’ names in the order they are on the article.

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