Find Style Manuals and Citation Guides-The Library-University of California, Berkeley

Photograph: Students studying, Gardner Stacks, Doe Library

Find Style Manuals and Citation Guides

Style manuals provide guidance on questions of grammar, word usage, punctuation, organizing ideas, and other components of writing research papers and scholarly publications. Some manuals also give preferred citation formats for documenting the sources you used.

These sources include any books, articles, websites, images, media, or other publications which contributed to the ideas you present or which you quote. Failure to cite sources used is plagiarism, a serious violation of student and professional ethics and possibly of copyright laws.

Typically, the means to identify sources is to provide parenthetic notes within the text, or note numbers which link to citations with enough information for a reader to find the source in a library or on the Internet. In addition, a bibliography or complete list of works cited is usually provided at the end of your document. The note and bibliography format you use will be determined by the citation style you choose.

There are many citation styles. Which style to use is determined by your instructor or, if you are writing for publication, by the journal or publisher.

Citation styles for humanities and social sciences

In these disciplines and some others, the four most widely used style guides are listed below. Click on these links for sample citations and references to the complete printed guides:

APA Style Guide - From the American Psychological Association. Often preferred in the field of psychology and many other social sciences.
MLA Style Guide - From the Modern Language Association of America. Often preferred in the fields of literature, arts, humanities, and in some other disciplines.
Turabian & Chicago Style Guide - From the work of Kate Turabian at the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Press. Often preferred in history and many other disciplines.

Citation styles for health, biomedical, and other sciences

If you are writing in a scientific or engineering discipline or if your instructor requires you to use a style different from the four listed above, try the links below. Many journals and publishers in these disciplines have their own style guides.

Writing Research Papers guide to CBE (Council of Biology Editors) Style from Monroe Community College.
National Library of Medicine Recommended Formats for Bibliographic Citation. Provides guidelines and samples citations for books, journal articles, conference papers, etc. A supplement provides examples for citing Internet formats such as databases, web pages, e-mail, and discussion lists.
Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences (Raymon H. Mulford Library, Medical College of Ohio). "These pages contain links to Web sites which provide instructions to authors for over 3,500 journals in the health and life sciences."
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. This guide should be used in conjunction with the list of Journals in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals Agreement.

Other style manuals

Many other style manuals are available in the libraries and can be found through Pathfinder. To find a specific manual, search its title and/or author. For a generic list, choose the Subject Keyword(s) option and enter: (writing or style) manuals. To make the search more specific, you can add words such as history or biology.

Citation management software

You may want to use one of the bibliography/footnote-management programs, EndNote or RefWorks, both of which provide assistance formatting citations in a wide variety of styles. Help pages for using these programs are available from the Bioscience and Engineering Libraries.

For more information

See our page on Citing Your Sources.