Citations Made Easy

I don't know how much energy we all put into teaching (and writing our own) citations, but I think it's quite a bit. Each department has different guidelines and each student brings his/her own background and understanding when they enter college. Some were well prepared in high school and are pros at properly giving credit to their sources. Others may not have ever written a citation, especially not a citation in a particular format.  Some may have "citation trauma" (a term I made up just now, but I'm sure we've all seen: deer in headlights, too afraid to even begin approaching a resource citation).

When something is too overwhelming for me, whether it is understanding a process or trying to come to a major life decision, I try to break it down into less-overwhelming parts. I figured this approach can't hurt with our incoming first-year students either!

It's not revolutionary, earth shattering, or even pretty (but, I suppose, if you feel so inspired you could add some visual pizzazz), but this citation chart is something I have started using to help students extract the citation information they need from an article (below is the APA version). I have 3 different charts for the 3 major citation styles we see students use the most. It is organized in such a way that the students plug in the information so that it is in the same order they'll use when pulling together their citation.

Citation Chart: APA

Articles

Author’s last name, author’s first and middle initials (if the middle initials are provided; if they aren’t then don’t worry about it.  Include all authors if there is more than one)
Year the article was published
Title of the article (include subtitle)
Title of the journal the article was published in
Journal volume number
Journal issue number
Page numbers for the article
DOI or Permalink for the article (if you found it electronically in a database or on a website)

Books

Author (formatted like articles)
Year the book was published
Title of the Book (include subtitle)
Location where the book was published
Name of the publisher

Websites

Author (formatted like articles. If there isn’t an author, replace it with the organization that put together the website, usually found at the bottom by the copyright date)
Date information for the page or when the whole website was published
Title of the webpage (include subtitle)
The link to the website (be careful here—copy and paste rather than retype)

Newspaper Articles

Author (formatted like articles)
Date the article was published (include the year, month, & day)
Title of the article (include subtitle)
Title of the newspaper the article was published in
Page numbers for the article (if you found it in print)
Permalink for the article (if you found it electronically in a database or on a website)

What are some ways you help students break challenges down into smaller parts?