School Me Saturday 6/24/23-citations

Citation.

The word to strike fear into the heart of any student.

Not the ticket you get from law enforcement.

A citation is properly acknowledging where the information that is in the paper/dissertation/article is from.

I do think the world could use a little more proper citation.

But the act of creating a citation is confusing.

The first thing you need to know is which one.

Will it be MLA? Which is from the Modern Language Association.

Will it be APA? Which is from the American Psychological Association.

Will it be CT? Which is the Chicago/Turabian style.

These are the three most common. And they all serve a different need.

The APA is used for Education. This is at the university level. Unless your particular university/college uses something else.

The MLA is used for the humanities.

The CR is used for business. history and the fine arts.

Confused yet?

Which one to use is determined by the program you are in.

And the styles are vastly different.

So it is important to know why one to use.

Not only is the citation style different, each one dictates how the paper etc is to look.

And they change and update!

When I was doing my BSN and my MSN, it was the APA 6th edition. For my PhD, only 2 years later, it is APA 7th edition.

There are books.

There are YouTube videos.

There are websites dedicated to helping you make the citation from an article or scientific paper.

But be careful.

A basic grounding of the rules is important.

This means you can catch the errors that the citation machine makes.

The proper citation of material can be as much as 10-25% of a grade on a paper. That can mean the difference between passing or not.

It is important to learn the basics or to know who to ask if you run into trouble.

Is it obnoxious? Sure.

But at the heart, it is standardization of language. And as an OR nurse whose surgeons sometimes call for the stabby thing or the hooky thing, I know this is important.

Painful.

But important.