Social Work and Human Services

The APA (American Psychological Association) Style Manual is most commonly used by writers of social science papers. It offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, tables, and reference pages.

Academic study begins by examining the work of scholars that have come before us. While it is essential that your work is written in your own words, it is equally important that proper credit is given to the authors we have studied and learned from.  We do this by citing our sources, and quoting or paraphrasing the original writers when appropriate.

A citation credits the source of your information.  Cite the sources of your information according to the rules of your professor's preferred style guide (MLA, APA, etc.).  Even if your work is wholly written in your own voice, you need to cite the source of your information to give credit to the original scholars and to show the thoroughness of your research.  When another author's words or ideas are presented in your work, they need to be quoted or paraphrased. 

Example:

• Paraphrase
  • "In The Road to Wiggan Pier George Orwell argues that the eccentricities of the types of individuals who identify as socialists make a poor case for an otherwise sound ideology"  
• Quotation
  • "'As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.'" (George Orwell, The Road to Wiggan Pier, Chapter 11).

Quoting, Paraphrasing and Summarizing at Purdue OWL

Quoting and Paraphrasing at The University of Wisconsin

Quoting Materials at Plagiarism.org

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive / evaluative paragraph, called the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.

Check out Cornell University Library’s guide to writing an annotated bibliography for detailed information.

Zotero is a free, open-source program that can be downloaded as a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and as a standalone program that works with Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. For most databases and websites, citation information can be saved with just a few clicks. You can also download an extension for Microsoft Word, that will allow you to drag records in Zotero into your word document to instantly create citations in formats like MLA and APA.

Zotero is already installed on all the computers in the CSUDH library.