References and Citation Styles

References (also called citations) occur in two different places in your paper. The first type are in-text references that occur in the text where the quotation or related information is written and usually only contain just enough information to redirect the reader to the end references. End references give all the information the reader needs to find the research source. Sometimes the end references are called works cited, bibliography, or just references.

Although there are many different standard reference styles, the good news is that they all fall into two categories: author-date (or name-year) and citation sequence. APA is an example of an author-date system.