To formally document the research you’ve done, use a two-part system to give credit to the sources you’re using. The first part is a citation that gives 2-3 brief pieces of information about the source where you use it (e.g., right after a quotation or paraphrase) in your document. This citation points the reader to the second part: the bibliographic reference indexed at the end of the document. This reference gives further details about the source so that readers can easily retrieve it themselves (e.g., by clicking on the URL if it’s an online source). Though documenting research requires a little effort, not doing so is irresponsible and subject to academic consequences if you commit such plagiarism at college and possible legal action if you do it professionally. Given such dire consequences, it’s worth considering why you must credit sources and what exactly is wrong with plagiarism before focusing on how to document sources in detail throughout the following sections:

• 3.5.1: Academic Integrity vs. Plagiarism
• 3.5.2: Citing and Referencing Sources in APA Style
• 3.5.3: Citing and Referencing Sources in MLA Style
• 3.5.4: Citing and Referencing Sources in IEEE Style
• 3.5.5: Citing Images and Other Media

3.5.1: Academic Integrity vs. Plagiarism

Academic integrity basically means that you do your work yourself and formally credit your sources when you use research sources, whereas plagiarism is cheating. Students often plagiarize by stealing the work of others from the internet (e.g., copying and pasting text or dragging and dropping images), including sites that facilitate cheating like Course Hero and generative AI such as ChatGPT, and dumping it into an assignment without quoting or citing. If a student submits an assignment under their own name without acknowledging their sources, they’ve dishonestly presented someone else’s work as their own.

Why would a student try to trick their instructor by plagiarizing when instructors award points for students doing research? If you’re going to do your homework, you might as well do it right by finding credible sources, documenting them, and getting credit for doing so. Why bother sneaking your research in as if you’ll get points for originality, for coming up with professional-grade material yourself, when you will just end up getting penalized for it? Consider that your instructors can spot plagiarism from miles away; they’ve seen it all before and can easily tell the difference between student work that is done well and dirty work infused with uncredited sources. When they see plagiarism, they enter the offending student into an academic integrity sanctioning process that is described in more detail below and ends with the student failing the assignment, getting a violation added to their academic record, and doing more work than they saved by not crediting their sources.

Why is plagiarism so wrong? Put simply, plagiarism is theft. Bad habits of stealing others’ work in school likely begin as liberal attitudes towards intellectual property in our personal lives but often develop into more serious crimes of copyright or patent violations in professional situations with equally serious legal, financial, and reputational penalties. The bad habits may start from routines of pirating media content illegally because, well, it’s so easy, it seems common, and few seem to get caught (Cross, 2023)—or so the thinking goes. The rewards seem to outweigh the risks. However, when download bandits become professionals and are tasked with, say, posting on their company website some information about a new service the company is offering, their research and writing procedure might go something like this:

1. They want their description of the service to look professional, so they Google-search to see what other companies offering the same service say about it on their websites. So far so good.
2. Those other descriptions look good, and the employee can’t think of a better way to put it, so they copy and paste the other company’s description into their own website. Here’s where things go wrong.
3. They also see that the other company has posted an attractive photo beside their description, so the employee downloads that and puts it on their website also.

The problem is that both the text and photo were copyrighted, as indicated by the “All Rights Reserved” copyright notice at the bottom of the other company’s webpage. Once the employee posts the stolen text and photo, the copyright owner (or their legal agents) find it through a monitoring service or automated AI crawling (Hall, 2023; Shirey, 2023; DMCA, 2026). The company’s agents send them a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown “cease & desist” order, but they ignore it and then find that they’re getting sued for damages. Likewise, if you’re in hi-tech R&D (research and development), help develop technology that uses already-patented technology without paying royalties to the patent owner, and take it to market, the patent owner is being robbed of the ability to earn revenue on their intellectual property themselves and can sue you for lost earnings. Patent, copyright, and trademark violations are a major legal and financial concern in the professional world (Morales, 2020), and acts of plagiarism have indeed ruined perpetrators’ careers when they’re caught, which is more likely than ever (Admin, 2023).

Every college has its own academic integrity policy that helps you avoid the consequences of plagiarism. Algonquin College’s policy, for instance, is very thorough:

Plagiarism: The use of ideas, content, or structures without appropriately acknowledging the source in a setting where originality is expected, leading to unfair advantage. Plagiarism, whether done deliberately or accidentally, is presenting someone else’s work, in whole or in part, as one’s own. Sharing one’s work with other learners where this has not been authorized is also considered an act of plagiarism. (Algonquin College, 2026, p. 13)

A couple of points here are worth considering in more detail:

1. You can be penalized for sloppy research that results in accidental plagiarism such as copying text from the internet or AI but not identifying the source, forgetting where the text came from, then putting it in your assignment anyway in the final rush to get it done. Likewise, you can be penalized for casually dragging and dropping a photo from the internet into a PowerPoint presentation or inserting one from an image bank without crediting the source because putting your name on that presentation implies that you generated all the content, including that image, when in fact you just took it. Besides text and images, the above-cited policy document’s extended definition of plagiarism says that it applies to ideas, documents, and media of all kinds (pp. 13-14).
2. You can also be penalized for providing a classmate with your work for the purposes of plagiarizing, so you must be careful about sharing your work with others. If a classmate says they would just like to take a look at an assignment you worked on so they could get a sense of what they’re supposed to do for it, being nice means you could get taken advantage of. You might find yourself caught up in a plagiarism case if that classmate copies your work instead. Claiming that they misrepresented what they said they would do with the work you shared with them does not absolve you of blame.

Also worth noting in Algonquin College’s Academic Integrity policy is that penalties for plagiarizing increase with each offense. Whether accidental or deliberate, a student’s first act of plagiarism might result in a grade of zero on the assignment. The instructor may give the student the opportunity to correct just the plagiarism in it, resubmit it, and get the mark they would have earned originally if not for the plagiarism, but that is up to the instructor. Depending on the situation, the instructor may report the incident to their manager so that a record of the offense is logged in the student’s academic record in case a second offense happens in that course or another in the program. That way, the manager can see a pattern of plagiarism across all of the student’s courses, a pattern that the instructors in each individual course don’t see. Serious first-time or further offenses may also involve the department chair putting an “encumbrance” on the student’s academic record and enrolling them in an Academic Integrity online remedial “bonus” course that takes a few hours to complete. The student won’t be able to progress to the next semester or graduate until the encumbrance is lifted by passing the remedial course.

Subsequent plagiarism offenses after this can get a student expelled from the course, from their program, and from the College altogether. A student who gets that far would probably have to want to be expelled through serial plagiarism when they knows it’s wrong and they’ll get caught but do it anyway. The internet may make cheating easier by offering easy access to coveted material, but it also makes detection easier in the same way.

Students who think they’re too clever to get caught plagiarizing may not realize that plagiarism in anything they submit electronically is easily exposed by sophisticated plagiarism-detection software and other techniques. Most instructors use apps like Turnitin (built into the Brightspace LMS) that produce originality reports showing the percentage of assignment content copied from sources found either on the public internet or in a global database of student-submitted assignments. That way, assignments borrowed or bought from someone who’s submitted the same or similar will also be flagged. For instance, the software would alert the instructor of common plagiarism scenarios, such as when:

• Two students in the same class submit substantially the same assignment work because, for example:
  • One of them started working on it the night before it was due and got their classmate friend to send them their assignment draft, which the cheating student changed slightly to make it look different; it will still be 90% the same, which is enough for the instructor to give both students a zero and require that they meet after class to discuss who did what. Remember that supplying someone with materials for the purpose of plagiarism is also a punishable offense.
  • They worked on the assignment together, even though it was designated an individual assignment only, but each changed a few details here and there at the end to make the submissions look different.

• A student submits an assignment that was previously submitted by another student in another class at the same time or in the past, at a different school, or even on the other side of the planet (either way, they’re all in the global database). This includes assignments posted to the open internet on crowdsourced websites such as Course Hero or Chegg that give students access to other students’ completed assignments and exam material in exchange for their own completed assignments or a subscription fee. Besides requiring students to commit truly illegal acts of copyright violation for which they can be sued (Flaherty, 2022), using Course Hero and similar sites is just a bad idea because the sort of students who post their assignment work to it because they’re looking for an assignment to copy do shoddy work. Copying such work leads not only to a poor grade but also to academic discipline (plus a permanent stain on the student’s record) and little-to-no learning to show for it besides realizing it was a bad move.

Other techniques allow instructors to track down uncited media just as professional photographers or stock photography vendors like Getty Images use digital watermarks or reverse image searches to find unpermitted uses of their copyrighted material.

Plagiarized AI—called “Unauthorized Content Generation” in the above Academic Integrity policy document (Algonquin College, 2026, p. 14)—is also easy to sniff out by instructors. Dramatic, isolated improvements in a student’s quality of work either between assignments or within an assignment will trigger an instructor’s suspicions. If a student’s work is rife with writing errors when they’re required to handwrite content in class but perfect when they’re at home using a computer, that will certainly arouse an instructor’s suspicions of generative AI being used when it’s not allowed. Likewise, if a student’s writing on an assignment is mostly terrible with multiple writing errors in each sentence, but then is suddenly perfect and professional-looking in one sentence only without quotation marks or a citation, the instructor just runs a Google search on that sentence to find where exactly it was copied from.

A cheater’s last resort to try to make plagiarism untraceable used to be to pay someone to do a customized assignment for them—called “contract cheating,” perhaps sourced from an “essay mill”—but this still arouses suspicions for the same reasons as above. These days, generative AI such as ChatGPT performs the same function, usually for free, but the effect is the same: robbing the student who outsources their task of learning to someone or something else—in this case a chatbot. The problem is that generative AI can produce incorrect content similar to Wikipedia or “hallucinated” content (completely made up and bizarre), making it an unreliable source, as well as produce that content in a distinctive writing style and structure (see Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI Writing”) that is a dead-giveaway to instructors. The consequences are also the same since academic fraud committed using generative AI is prosecuted by colleges’ academic integrity investigation mechanisms using policy clauses related to contract cheating.

In any case, the student who goes from submitting poor work to perfect work becomes a “person of interest” target to their instructor in all that they do after that. In the case of traditional contract cheating, the hack also becomes expensive not only for that assignment but also for all the instances when the cheater will have to pay someone to do the work that they should have just learned to do themselves. Habitual overreliance on generative AI may also lead to a dependency that permanently deprives students of writing abilities when they become graduates. For all these reasons, it’s better just to learn what you’re supposed to by doing assignments yourself and showing academic integrity by crediting sources properly when doing research.

Do you need to cite absolutely everything you research? Not necessarily. Good judgment is required to know what information can be left uncited without penalty. If you look up facts that are common knowledge (perhaps just not common to you yet, since you had to look them up), you wouldn’t need to cite them. Say you discovered in your research that the first Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. MacDonald, represented the riding of Victoria for his second term as PM without even setting foot there. Do you need to cite that fact? No, because any credible source you consulted would say the same, and there’s no point in crediting sources for universally recognized facts. Such citations end up looking like attempts to pad an assignment with research.

Certainly anything quoted directly from a source (because the wording is important) must be cited, as well as anyone’s original ideas, opinions, or theories that you paraphrase or summarize (i.e., indirectly quote) from a book, article, webpage, or some other published source with an identifiable author, argument, and/or primary research producing new facts and findings. You must also cite any media such as photos, videos, drawings/paintings, graphics, graphs, etc. If you are ever unsure about whether something should be cited, you can always ask your librarian or, better yet, your instructor since they’ll ultimately assess your work for academic integrity. Even the mere act of asking assures them that you care about academic integrity. For more on plagiarism, you can also visit plagiarism.org and Purdue OWL’s Avoiding Plagiarism series of modules.

3.5.2: Citing and Referencing Sources in APA Style

As mentioned above, a research documentation system comes in two parts. First, the in-text citation briefly notes a few details about the source (author, year, and location when necessary) in parentheses immediately after your use of the source (making it “in text”), such as a quotation, paraphrase, or summary. This citation points the reader to more bibliographic details (title and publication information) in a full reference entry indexed at the end of your document such as the References section you see at the bottom of this webpage. For this to work, the information in the citation (author and year) must be the same in the corresponding parts of the reference so the reader can make the connection. Let’s now focus on the style and form of in-text citations and references in the different documentation styles—APA, MLA, and IEEE—used by different disciplines across the college.

Parenthetical In-text Citations in APA Style

The American Psychological Association’s documentation style is preferred by the social sciences and general disciplines such as business because of its streamlined form. The basic structure of APA parenthetical in-text citations following the use of a source is as follows:

• Signal phrase, direct or indirect quotation (Author, Year, location of source passage).
• Example: According to one CEO, “There’s no value in a job candidate who cheated their way out of their education” (Goodwin, p. 66).

Its placement tells the reader that everything between the signal phrase (see §3.4.1) and citation is either direct or indirect quotation of the source, and everything after (until the next signal phrase) is your own writing and ideas. Follow the conventions for each of the three parts of the citation discussed below:

1. Author(s) last name(s)

• • The author’s last name (surname) and the year of publication (in that order) can appear either in the signal phrase or citation, but not in both. Table 3.5.2 below shows both options (e.g., Examples 1 and 3 versus 2 and 4, etc.).
  • When two authors are credited with writing a source, their surnames are separated by “and” in the signal phrase and an ampersand (&) in the parenthetical citation (see Examples 3-4 in Table 3.5.2 below).
  • When a source authored by three or more people is credited, only the first author appears, followed by “et al.” (abbreviating et alium in Latin, meaning “and the rest”). See Examples 5-6 in Table 3.5.2 below.
  • If two or more authors of the same work have the same surname, add first/middle initials in the citation as given in the References at the back.
  • If no author name is given, either use the organization or company name (corporate author) or, if that’s not an option, the title of the work in quotation marks.
    • If the organization is commonly referred to by an abbreviation (e.g., “CIHR” for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research), spell out the full name in the signal phrase and put the abbreviation in the parenthetical citation the first time you use it, or spell out the full name in the citation and add the abbreviation in brackets before the year of publication that first time, then use the abbreviation for all subsequent uses of the same source. See Examples 9-10 in Table 3.5.2 below.
    • If no author of any kind is available, put the title in the author position in the citation with quotation marks around it—e.g., (“APA Style,” 2008)—and in the bibliographical entry at the back but without quotation marks and followed by a period.

• • If the source you’re using quotes another source, try to find that other, original source yourself and use it instead. If it’s important to show both, you can indicate the original source in the signal phrase and the source you accessed it through in the citation, as in following example:
    • Though kinematics is now as secular as science can possibly be, in its 1687 Principia Mathematica origins, Sir Isaac Newton theorized that gravity was willed by God (as cited in Whaley, 1977, p. 64).

2. Year of Publication

• • The publication year follows the author surname either in parentheses on its own if in the signal phrase (see the odd-numbered Examples in Table 3.5.2 below) or follows a comma if both are in the citation instead (even-numbered Examples).
  • If the full reference also indicates a month and date following the year of publication (e.g., for news articles, blogs, etc.), the citation still shows just the year.
  • If you cite two or more works by the same author published in the same year, follow the year with lowercase letters (e.g., 2026a, 2026b, 2026c) in the order that they appear alphabetically by title (which follows the author and year) in both the in-text citations and full bibliographical entries in the References at the back.

3. Location of the direct or indirect quotation within the work used

• • Include the location if your direct or indirect quotation comes from a precise location within a larger work because it will save the reader time knowing that a quotation from a 300-page book is on page 244, for instance, if they want to look it up themselves.
  • Don’t include the location if you’ve summarized the source in its entirety or referred to it only in passing, perhaps in support of a minor point, so that readers can find the source if they want to read further. If you summarize something specific to a page or range of pages, however, add the page or page range to your citation.
  • For source text organized with page numbers, use “p.” to abbreviate “page” or “pp.” to abbreviate “pages.” For instance, “p. 56,” indicates that the direct or indirect quotation came from page 56 of the source text, “pp. 192-194” that it came from pages 192 through 194, inclusive, and “pp. 192, 194” from pages 192 and 194 (but not 193).
  • For sources that have no pagination, such as webpages, use paragraph numbers (whether the paragraphs are numbered by the source text or not) preceded by the abbreviation “para.” (see Examples 1-2 and 5-6 in the table below). Note that you may also see the paragraph symbol “¶” (called a pilcrow) used instead of “para.,” but “para.” is easier to write and more common.

Table 3.5.2 shows how these guidelines play out in sample citations with variables such as the placement of the author and year in either the signal phrase or parenthetical in-text citation, number of authors, and source types. Notice that, for punctuation:

• Parentheses ( ) are used for citations, not brackets [ ]. The second one, “),” is called the closing parenthesis.
• The sentence-ending period follows the citations, so if the original source text of a quotation ended with a period, you would move it to the right of the citation’s closing parenthesis.
• If the quoted text ended with a question mark (?) or exclamation mark (!), the mark stays within the quotation marks (i.e., to the left of the closing quotation marks) and a period is still added to end the sentence; if you want to end your sentence and quotation with a period or exclamation mark, it would simply replace the period to the right of the closing parenthesis (see Example 8 in the table below).

Table 3.5.2: Example APA-style In-text Citations with Variations in Number of Authors and Source Types

For more on APA-style citations, see the Purdue OWL’s In-text Citations: The Basics, its follow-up page on authors, and the Algonquin College Library’s Citing and Documenting Sources page of resources, especially the latest version of its APA Style Manual PDF.

Bibliographical References in APA Style

In combination, citations and references offer a reader-friendly means of enabling readers to find and retrieve research sources themselves, as each citation points them to the full bibliographical details in the References list indexed at the end of the document. If the documentation system were reduced to just one part where citations were filled with the bibliographical details, the reader would be constantly impeded by 2-3 lines of bibliographical details following each use of a source. By tucking the full bibliographical entries away at the back, authors also enable readers to go to the References list to examine at a glance the extent to which a document is informed by credible sources as part of a due-diligence credibility check in the research process (see §3.2.4).

Each bibliographical entry making up the References list includes information about a source in a certain order. Consider the following bibliographical entry for a book in APA style, for instance:

Strunk, W., & White, E. B. (2000). Elements of style (4th ed.). Allyn & Bacon.

We see here a standard sequence including the authors, year of publication, title (italicized because it’s a long work), and publication information. You can follow this model closely for the punctuation and style for any book. Online sources follow much the same style, except that the publisher location and name are replaced by the web address, as in:

Wiens, K. (2012, July 20). I won’t hire people who use poor grammar. Here’s why. Harvard Business Review. http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/07/i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo/

Note that the title has been split into both a webpage title (the non-italicized title of the article) in sentence style (see the point on Title[s] below) and the title of the website, which is italicized because it’s the larger work from which the smaller one came. The easiest way to remember the rule for whether to italicize the title is to ask yourself: is the source I’m referencing the part or the whole? The whole (a book, a journal, magazine, or newspaper title) is always in italics, whereas the part (a book chapter or article in a magazine, journal, or newspaper) is not; see the third point below on Titles for more on this). A magazine article reference follows a similar sequence of information pieces, albeit replacing the publication or web information with the volume number, issue number, and page range of the article within the magazine, as in:

Dames, K. M. (2007, June). Understanding plagiarism and how it differs from copyright infringement. Computers in Libraries, 27(6), 25-27.

With these three basic source types in mind, let’s examine some of the guidelines for forming bibliographical entries with a view to variations for each part such as number and types of authors and titles:

• Author(s): The last name followed by a comma and the author’s first initial (and middle initial[s] if given)
  • For two authors, add a comma and ampersand (&) after the first author’s initials
  • For three or more authors, add a comma after each (except for the last one) and add an ampersand between the second-to-last (penultimate) and last author.
  • Follow the order of author names as listed in the source. If they are in alphabetical order already, it may be because equal weight is being given to each; if not, it likely means that the first author listed did most of the work and therefore deserves first mention.
  • If no personal name is given for the author, use the name of the organization (i.e., corporate author) or editor(s) (see the point on editors below).
  • If no corporate author name is given, skip the author (don’t write “Anon.” or “N.A.”) and move the title into the author position followed by a period and the publication year in parentheses.

• Year of publication: In parentheses followed by a period
  • If an exact calendar date is given (e.g., for a news article or blog), start with the year followed by a comma, the month (fully spelled out) and date, such as “(2026, July 25).” Some webpages will indicate the exact calendar date and time they were updated, in which case use that because you can assume that the authors checked to make sure all the content was current as of that date and time. Often, the only date given on a website will be the copyright notice at the bottom, which is the current year you’re in and common to all webpages on the site, even though the page you’re on could have been posted long before, so do not use that as the date.
  • If no date is given, indicate “(n.d.),” the abbreviation for “no date.” For electronic sources, however, you can try to determine the date by other means. As said in §3.2.1, type Ctrl + U when on a webpage to open its HTML source code, then search it (Ctrl + F) for “datepublished” or just “date,” and the date may appear there, but not always.
  • If listing multiple sources by the same author, the placement of the years of publication means that bibliographical entries must be listed chronologically from earliest to most recent.
  • If listing two or more sources by the same author in the same year (without month or date information), follow the year of publication with lowercase letters arranged alphabetically by the first letter in the title following the year of publication (e.g., 2018a, 2018b, 2018c).

• Title(s): Give the title in “sentence style”—i.e., capitalize the first letter, but make all subsequent words lowercase except those that would be capitalized anyway (proper nouns like personal names, place names, days of the week, etc.; see §5.5.1) or those to the right of a colon dividing the main title and subtitle, and end it with a period.
  • If the source is a smaller work (usually contained in a larger one), like an article in a newspaper or scholarly journal, a webpage, a chapter in a book, a short report (less than 50 pages), a song on an album, a short film, etc., make it plain style (not italicized) without quotation marks, and end it with a period.
  • If the source is a smaller work that is contained within a larger one, follow it with the title of the longer work capitalized as it is originally with all major words in uppercase letters (i.e., don’t make the larger work sentence-style), italicized, and ending with a period.
  • If the source is a longer work like a book, website, magazine, journal, film, album, long report (more than 50 pages), italicize it. If it doesn’t follow the title of a shorter work that it contains, make it sentence-style (see the Elements of Style example above, which becomes “Elements of style” with the “S” in “Style” becoming a lowercase “s”).
  • If the book is a later edition, add the edition number in parentheses and plain style following the title (again, see the Elements of Style example above).

• Editor(s): If a book identifies an editor or editors, include them between the title and publication information with their first-name initial (and middle initial if given) and last name (in that order), “(Ed.)” for a single editor or “(Eds.)” for multiple editors (separated by an ampersand if there are only two and commas plus an ampersand if there are three or more), followed by a period.
  • If the book is a collection of materials, put the editor(s) in the author position with their last name(s) first followed by “(Ed.)” or “(Eds.),” a period, then the year of publication, etc.

• Publication information: Just the name of the publisher and a period.
  • Keep the publisher name to the bare essentials; delete corporate designations like “Inc.” or “Ltd.”
  • APA style prior to the 7th edition required you to include the city in which the publisher was based, positioned before the publisher name and followed by a colon, but this practice was phased out.

• Web information: If the source is entirely online, replace the publisher with the web address (URL).
  • If the online source is likely to change over time, add “Retrieved on” and the date you viewed it in “Month DD, YYYY,” style so that a future reader who follows the web address to the source and finds something different from what you quoted understands that what you quoted has been altered since you viewed it. Otherwise, don’t add “Retrieve on,” which was a requirement phased out of APA style with in the 7th edition except in the case of regularly updated pages.
  • If the source is a print edition (book, magazine article, journal article, etc.) that also has an online version, give the publication information as you would for the print source and follow it with the URL.
  • If all you’re doing is mentioning a website in your text, you can just give the root URL (e.g., APAStyle.org without the “http://www” prefix) in your text rather than cite and reference it.

• Magazine/Journal volume/issue information: If the source is a magazine or journal article, replace the publisher information with the volume number, issue number, and page range.
  • Follow the italicized journal title with a comma, the volume number in italics, the issue number in non-italicized parentheses (with no space between the volume number and the opening parenthesis), a comma, the page range with a hyphen between article’s first and last page numbers, and a period.
  • The Dames article given as an example above, for instance, spans pages 25-27 of the June issue (i.e., #6) of the monthly journal Computers in Libraries’ 27th volume.
• Other source types: If you often encounter other source types such as government publications, brochures, presentations, etc., getting a copy of the latest Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020) might be worth your while. If you’re a more casual researcher, you can consult plenty of online guides such as the Algonquin College Library’s APA Style Manual on its Citing and Documenting Sources page.

Though reference generator applications are available online (simply Google-search for them), with AI help, and as features within word-processing software like Microsoft Word to construct citations and references for you, putting them together on your own may save time if you’re adept at APA. The following guidelines help you organize and format your References page(s) according to APA convention when doing it manually:

• Title: References
  • Center the title at the top of the page at the end of your document (though you may include appendices after it if you have a long report).
  • The title is not “Works Cited” (as in MLA) nor “Bibliography”; a bibliography is a list of sources not tied to another document, such as the annotated bibliography discussed in §3.3.

• Listing order: Alphabetically (unnumbered) by first author surname
  • If a corporate author (company name or institution) is used instead of a personal name and it starts with “The,” alphabetize by the next word in the title—i.e., include “The” in the author position, but disregard it when alphabetizing.
  • If neither a personal nor corporate author is identified, alphabetize by the first letter in the source title moved into the author position.

• Spacing: Single-space within each bibliographical entry, double between them
  • “Double between” here means adding a blank line between each bibliographical entry, as seen in the References section at the end of each section in this resources.
  • You may see some institutions, publishers, and employers vary this with all bibliographical entries being double spaced; just follow whatever style guide pertains to your situation and ask whoever’s assessing your work if unsure.

• Hanging indentation: The left edge of the first line of each bibliographical entry is flush to the left margin and each subsequent line of the same reference is tabbed in by a half centimeter or so.
  • To do this, simply highlight your list of sources and type Ctrl + T. If that doesn’t work, do the following:
    1. Highlight all bibliographical entries (click and drag your cursor from the top left to the bottom right of your list).
    2. Make the ruler visible in your word processor (e.g., in MS Word, go to the View menu and check the “Ruler” box).
    3. Move the bottom triangle of the tab half a centimeter to the right; this requires surgically pinpointing the cursor tip on the bottom triangle (in the left tab that looks like an hourglass with the top triangle’s apex pointing down, a bottom triangle with the apex pointing up, and a rectangular base below that) and dragging it to the right so that it detaches from the top triangle and base.

Examine the bibliographical entries at the bottom of this webpage and throughout this resource for examples of the variations discussed throughout.

3.5.3: Citing and Referencing Sources in MLA Style

The Modern Languages Association (MLA) documentation style is favoured by humanities disciplines and is therefore rarely used in the vocational college system. Though both two-part systems apply many of the same principles in citing and referencing, MLA favours an even more streamlined structure of citation, reduced to just the author(s) and location with no comma between:

• Signal phrase, direct or indirect quotation (Author location).
• Example: According to one CEO, “There’s no value in a job candidate who cheated their way out of their education” (Goodwin 66).

The “p.” we saw before the page number in APA is assumed (omitted) in MLA. Like APA, if the author is identified in the signal phrase, the contents of the parenthetical in-text citation are reduced to just the page number—e.g., “(66).” Slight deviations from APA style also include using “and” instead of “&” to separate two authors in MLA in-text citations, and “et al.” replaces the second, third, and any other authors, even the first time it appears if the source has three or more authors. For more on MLA-style citations, see Purdue OWL’s MLA In-Text Citations: The Basics.

MLA bibliographical entries are similar to APA references in many respects but different in certain details. Consider typical book, article, and online article bibliographical entries in an MLA-style Works Cited list:

Dames, K. Matthew. “Understanding Plagiarism and How It Differs from Copyright Infringement.” Computers in Libraries, vol. 27, no. 6, 2007, pp. 25-27.

Strunk, William, and E. B. White. Elements of Style. 1959. 4th ed., Allyn & Bacon, 2000.

Wiens, Kyle. “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.” Harvard Business Review, 20 July 2012, blogs.hbr.org/2012/07/i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo/. Accessed 20 November 2017.

The following points cover major differences between MLA and APA:

• The title of the list of bibliographical entries is “Works Cited” rather than “References,” but it is likewise centered as the top of the page.
• All bibliographical entries are double-spaced if the document text is double-spaced with no additional space between entries, but single-spaced if the rest of the document is single-spaced.
• Authors’ first names are fully spelled out rather than given as initials, and additional authors after the first in a multi-author source are given in the normal order of first name then last name.
• Two-author sources use “and” between them (not “&”), as well as between the penultimate and last author in sources with three or more authors.
• Titles are capitalized normally (not converted into sentence style), with prepositions, conjunctions, and articles all lowercase unless they’re the first word in the title or subtitle.
• The titles of short works are surrounded by quotation marks; longer works are italicized just as in APA style.
• The year of publication comes at the end of a book reference following the publisher name and a comma.
  • If the book is republished, the original publication year appears following the title’s period and ends with a period itself.
• The edition precedes the publisher name and is separated from the latter by a comma.
• The “http://” is omitted from URLs.

For more on MLA Works Cited conventions, see Purdue OWL’s MLA Works Cited Page: Basic Format and the pages following it.

3.5.4: Citing and Referencing Sources in IEEE Style

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) documentation style is favoured by pure STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines and is therefore second to APA in its prevalence in the College of Applied Arts and Technology system. Like APA and MLA, it features a two-part system of in-text citations used to briefly credit sources used throughout a document and full bibliographical references indexed at the end of the document, but streamlines the former even further to just a bracketed number. Citations are numbered in order of their appearance, as are the bibliographical entries at the back since they correspond to the bracketed numbers throughout the document. The first few sources used would be cited in the following format:

Direct or indirect quotation from the first source [1]. Direct or indirect quotation from a second source [2]. Direct or indirect quotation from the first source again [1]. Direction or indirect quotation from a third source [3].

Besides being citations, the bracketed numbers may also be used as substitutes for naming the source itself, as in the following signal phrase preceding a summary of several sources:

According to [12], [15], and [17]-[20], . . . .

Bracketing the whole group of references (rather than each individually) is also acceptable (Murdoch University Library, 2025):

According to [12, 15, and 17-20], . . . .

Page or paragraph references can also be inserted into the citations as they were in APA and MLA—e.g., [12, p. 4], [15, para. 7].

The list of bibliographical entries at the back of the document is called “References” like in APA, but its organization differs. Rather than list the entries alphabetically by author last name, IEEE lists them in order of their appearance throughout your text with a column of the bracketed citation numbers flush to the left margin. Consider the three sample sources used to compare and contrast bibliographical entries for APA and MLA style above, now in IEEE:

[1] W. Strunk and E. B. White, Elements of Style, 4th ed., Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2000.

[2] K. Wiens. (2012, July 20). I won’t hire people who use poor grammar. Here’s why. Harv. Bus. Rev. [Online]. Available: https://hbr.org/2012/07/i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo. [Accessed: January 27, 2018].

[3] K. M. Dames, “Understanding plagiarism and how it differs from copyright infringement,” Comp. in Libr., vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 25-27, Jun., 2006.

The basic differences between IEEE-style References, APA, and MLA are as follows:

• The section title is “References” at the top of the page and left-aligned (beginning at the left margin rather than centred like in APA or MLA).
• Bibliographical entries are listed in their order of appearance with a column of bracketed numbers flush to the left margin.
• Authors’ first names are given as initials but placed before the last name.
• Double authors are separated by “and,” not “&.”
• Long works are italicized, short works are in sentence style, in plain style (not italicized), and are in quotation marks.
• Year/date of publication appears at the end for print sources but follow the author for online sources.
• Punctuation between parts is mostly commas for print sources and periods for online.

When writing a document involving research in IEEE style, you are strongly advised to use a citation and references generator such as that available in MS Word. Begin one even when starting a project with notes by going to the “References” menu at the top and selecting “Insert Citation.” Though the IEEE numbering system is reader friendly, documenting research manually, especially for larger projects with several sources, is difficult because adding references out of order during the writing process requires re-numbering all subsequent citations as well as their corresponding bibliographical entry numbers at the back. Say you’re writing a 20-page report and realize that you need to add an extra source between [12] and [13], and you’ve already cited 26 sources; after inserting the new [13], you would have to manually change the old [13] to [14], [14] to [15], and 11 others both throughout your report and in your references at the back; if you added yet another source in the middle somewhere, you’ll be re-numbering them all over again. A reference generator will re-number your references with the press of a button when adding citations out of order, as well as format your References list for you. Some stylistic adjustments will be necessary, however, due to differences between MS Word’s References formatting and that modeled in the IEEE Editorial Style Manual.

3.5.5: Citing Images and Other Media

We’ve so far covered citations and references when using text, but what about other media? How do you cite an image or a video embedded in a presentation, for instance? A common mistake among students is to place free images available through presentation software such as PowerPoint or Canva into their slideshow, or just grab whatever photos or illustrations they find in a Google image search, toss them into a presentation PowerPoint or other document, and be done with it. That would be classic plagiarism, however, since putting their name on an assignment that includes the uncredited work of others dishonestly presents other people’s work as their own. To avoid plagiarism, the student would first have to determine if they’re permitted to use the image, then cite it properly.

Whether you’ve been granted permission (e.g., through the presentation software supplying free images), own the image yourself, or not, you must still credit the source of the image just like when you quote directly or indirectly. Not citing an image even in the case of it being supplied for free or owning it yourself will result in the reader thinking that you may have stolen it from internet because there’s no source credit either way. Just because a photo or graphic is on the internet doesn’t mean that it’s for the taking; any image is automatically copyrighted by the owner as soon as they produce it (e.g., you own the copyright to all the photos you take on your mobile phone unless you post them to social media, in which case the platform becomes their sole legal owner). In the case of images provided for free through presentation software, they’re actually owned by Microsoft (if you get the image through PowerPoint) or Canva through their licence to stock-image providers like Getty Images.

Whether or not you can download and use images from the internet depends on both its copyright status and your purpose for using it. According to Canadian legislation, using images for educational purposes is considered “Fair Dealing” (a.k.a. “fair use,” which makes it safe to use) when you won’t make any money on it (Copyright Act, 1985, §29). Still, contacting the owner and asking permission is still the safest course of action. Next safest is to ask your librarian or instructor if your use of an image in whatever circumstances might be considered offside or fair.

Standard practice in citing images in APA style is to refer to them in your text and then properly label them with figure numbers, captions, and copyright details. Referring to them in your text, referencing the figure numbers in parentheses, and placing the image as close as possible to that reference ensures that the image is relevant to your topic rather than a frivolous attempt to pad your research document with non-text space-filler. The image must be:

• Centred on the page and appropriately sized given its resolution (do not make low-resolution, pixelated images large), dimensions, and relative importance
• Labeled immediately below with a figure number given in a consecutive order along with other images in your document
• Described briefly with a caption that also serves as the image’s title
• Attributed with original title, ownership, and retrieval information, including the URL if found online, as well as copyright status information, such as “Copyright 2026 by Liv Dernier. Printed with permission.”

Even if you retrieve the image from public domain archives such as the Wikimedia Commons (see Figure 1), you must indicate that status along with the other information outlined above and illustrated below.

Figure 1. Algonquin couple of the Kitcisipiriniwak (“Ottawa River Men”) encountered by the French on an islet on the Ottawa River. From “Algonquines,” watercolour by an unknown 18th-century artist, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Algonquins.jpg. Public domain (2008) courtesy of the City of Montreal Records Management & Archives, Montreal, Canada.

If your document is a PowerPoint or other type of presentation, however, which doesn’t give you much room for 2-4 lines of citation information without compromising clarity by minimizing its size, a more concise citation more like that you would do for directly or indirectly quoted text might be more appropriate. The citation below an image on a PowerPoint slide could thus look more like:

Source: “Algonquines” (2008)

In either case, the References at the end of the paper or slide deck would have a proper APA-style bibliographical entry in the following format:

Creator’s last name, first initial. (Role of creator). (Year of creation). Title of image or description of image. [Type of work]. Retrieved from URL/database

If the identity of the creator is not available and year of creation unknown, as in the above case, the title moves into the creator/owner’s position and the date given is when the image was posted online:

Algonquines. (2008, August 19). [Digital Image]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_people#/media/File:Algonquins.jpg

A common mistake is to identify “Google Images” as the source, but it’s a search engine, not a source, and doesn’t guarantee that the reader will be able to find the source you used. By having either that actual owner/author or title in the citation and the matching owner/author as the first word in the References section, you make it easy for the reader to go directly to the source you used, which is the whole point of the two-part citation/reference system.

For more, see the Simon Fraser University Library website’s guide Finding and using online images for a collection of excellent databases and other websites to locate images, detailed instructions for how to cite images in APA and MLA style, and information on handling copyrighted material. According to the IEEE Editorial Style Manual, the label below the image abbreviates “Figure” to “Fig.,” adds the figure number and caption, and ends with a bracketed in-text citation number (pp. 13-14):

Fig. 1. Algonquin couple [4]

In the References at the back, the IEEE figure would appear as:

[4] “Algonquines” [Online]. (2008, August 19). Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_people#/media/File:Algonquins.jpg. [Accessed: January 27, 2018].

For citing and referencing an online video such as from YouTube, just follow the latest guidelines from the official authority on each style such as APAStyle.org or examples given in Algonquin College Library’s APA Style Manual PDF on its Citing and Documenting Sources page. If a YouTube user posts content they don’t own the copyright to, indicate the actual author or owner in the author position as you would for anything else, but follow it with the user’s screen name in brackets. For a video on how to do this exactly, for instance, you would cite the author’s last name (since it’s known, in this case) followed by just the year it was posted (not the full date) indicated below the screen name and beside the number of views: (Seburn, 2021). In the References section, the author’s name appears as it normally would in APA style, followed by the screen name in brackets, the video title italicized in sentence-style, “[Video],” a period, the non-italicized platform (“YouTube”), a period, and the URL just like any other online source:

Seburn, C. [Smart Student]. (2021, August 18). YouTube videos: Citing and referencing them in APA 7th style [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgXRccS7va0

Whenever in doubt about what style to follow, especially as technology changes, always consult the relevant authority on whatever source medium you need to cite and reference. If you doubt Smart Student’s video above, for instance, you can verify the information at APAStyle.org and see that it indeed is accurate advice.