When you write a research paper in the humanities (English, Languages, Religion, Classics, Mythology, Art/History, Philosophy including Ethics) you use and build on information that others have found and compiled. 

Whether you are writing an expository report or (when you are more advanced) adding your insights and opinions to existing research, it is important to give credit where credit is due.  This must be done even, and especially, when what you have used is not in the form of a direct quotation, which should be the most usual situation.

That is the reason why we have to keep track of the exact place or page where we got the information. (The best and easiest way to keep track of the origins of the information is by using the index card method.)

Not to do so is considered plagiarism.
 

If you incorporate or refer to others' ideas or concepts in your paper, you must cite them and document their work. You must cite the sources you use to make statements of historical, statistical or scientific fact that are not common knowledge, and it's a good idea even if they are common knowledge.  As Francis Bacon, (17th century English philosopher) said, we should not begin with assumptions. 

Sometimes it is difficult to be sure what counts as common knowledge. A good rule is to ask yourself if the material or statement can be questioned; if someone can argue with it. If so, you should document it. If you aren't sure if something counts as common knowledge or not, go ahead and document it to be safe. 

Of course, you must also cite the source when you use direct quotes, material from the source written word for word, and when you paraphrase what you have read by rephrasing or summarizing information from a source.  Also cite sources for figures or charts from someone's work.

Citations in the humanities most often follow the format established by the Modern Language Association of America, a professional academic organization. The documentation consists of two main parts: 

• parenthetical citations and
• the Works Cited list.

MLA documentation uses parenthetical notation to cite sources within the text of your research paper (Gibaldi 184).  <-- Like that!  This means that when you use an author's ideas, or quote material you've read, or even just paraphrase that material, you indicate its source in parentheses at the end of your sentence or near the information if it is more suitable to do so. For instance, we cite the first sentence of this paragraph because it contains information from the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. The information in parentheses will tell the reader the author's last name and the page number where the original information used in your paper can be found. 

A reader will look at the author's last name and then refer to the Works Cited list at the end of your paper in order to obtain bibliographic information. When you use parenthetical notation you do not have to create footnotes or endnotes for your research paper. (Footnotes are old-fashioned, and endnotes are not suitable for student papers.)

A documented quote in your paper about the development of Black feminist literary theory will look like this:

"In speaking about the current situation of Black women writers, it is important to remember that the existence of a feminist movement was an essential precondition to the growth of feminist literature, criticism, and women's studies, which focused at the beginning almost entirely upon investigations of literature" (Smith 170).

Note: There is no comma between the author's last name and the page number. Also, the parentheses always come after the quotation's end punctuation, but before the punctuation at the end of the sentence. Even if there is end punctuation within the quotation marks such as a question mark or an exclamation mark, it is followed by the parenthetical notation and then the period. 

The reader will then go to Smith in your Works Cited list and find that it is an article in an edited anthology:

Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." The New 

Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory.  Elaine Showalter, ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 

Another citation option is to use attribution, that is to mention the author by name in the nearby text of your paper.  Then you may put only the page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence. There is not usually a need to mention the title, too; here we do only because there may be more than one essay by that author in the Works Cited.

Barbara Smith says, in Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, that when "... speaking about the current situation of Black women writers, it is important to remember that the existence of a feminist movement was an essential precondition to the growth of feminist literature, criticism, and women's studies, which focused at the beginning almost entirely upon investigations of literature" (170).

 

Parenthetical notation may require a bit of troubleshooting: 

SAME LAST NAME:

If you use two authors with the same last name, indicate the initial of their first name in the parentheses: (B. Smith 170), for instance.

NO AUTHOR: 

If you are given no author at all, choose a word from the title of the source to use in the parentheses and underline, bold, italicize  or punctuate it appropriately: ("Toward" 170), for instance.

SAME AUTHOR, MULTIPLE WORKS:

If you use more than one work by the same author, the author name must be accompanied by date of publication of the source you are referring to, or in a collection of essays, a word from the title:  (Hanks and Hodges 1988, 73) or (Smith, "Toward" 170), for instance.

ELECTRONIC SOURCES: 

If you use electronic sources, you must work with whatever information is provided at the online site. Search the site for an author, for a sub-title or section title.  When possible use: (Author page# or heading) YOUR printed-out page# is meaningless. 

If no headings are provided, use paragraph numbers instead: (Author par.#) or (Title par.#).  The url is used  in the Works Cited. 

The Works Cited list is the bibliography of your paper, but it includes only the sources that you parenthetically cite. This list is alphabetized by author or editor's last name with the different types of material all integrated into one list.  It is the last page (un-numbered) at the end of the research paper. Other types of assignments may have different requirements.

If there are sources you have read but did not specifically use in your paper, MLA suggests you include them in a Works Consulted list following the Works Cited list. 

BASIC BOOK:
             Author's Last Name, First Name. Book Title. City of Publication:
                           Publisher,  Date.
 

PERIODICAL: 

           Author's Last Name, First Name. "Article title: Subtitle." Periodical Title.
                         Volume (year): page numbers.
 

SOFTWARE: 

Author's Last Name, First Name. "Article title." Publication Title. 

                   publication information. Database. CD-ROM. Database provider. 
                   Date of edition.
 

         BASIC ONLINE [Web Site]: 

                          Author's Last Name, First Name. "Article title." Publication Title 

                                  publication information. URL or Database. Online. Computer 

                                  service. Date of access. 

for example,
 

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century, 1945 to the Present - Raymond Carver." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature-A Research and Reference Guide. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/carver.html

Accessed May 4, 2001. 

All citations, whether for books, periodicals, or other media, build on these basic elements. Some kinds of sources require finding and documenting more information than others.  Some, such as reference books, require less!

Format hints:

• To achieve the "reverse indent," hit enter at the end of the line of type. 
• If you have the ability to bold instead of underline, you may do so. (That helps nowadays, as underlining has come to indicate a website link.) Then, we use italics instead of quotation marks for an article-in-a-larger-work titles.
• Do not use the library card format of squared-off blocks of type that some programs produce; complete the full line of typing.
• The "--------- "  is only used to replace an author or editor's  name for another item by the same (preceding) author.
• Unknown is not to be used; you must find all necessary information which appears on the inner page of the item. (But we do not need data such as Library of Congress or ISBN numbers.) When there is truly no author or editor, the MLA format is to catalogue it, that is list it alphabetically using the title.
• Do not interrupt any url (http://xwy/tuy.htm) by putting bits of it on a different line.
• No need for Inc. or Co. in publishers' names.

The most common citations are for:

• books
• periodical articles (journal, magazine, newspaper)
• anthologies (collections of essays)
• computer software (NB general references such as Encarta are not usually sophisticated enough for specialized use.) 
• electronic sources (online, Internet, FTP sites, Gopher sites, WWW sites, Telnet sites, synchronous communications, email/listserv)
• and reference sources (dictionary, encyclopedia). 

Less typical sources may include:

• abstracts
• unpublished material (interviews - cited as Personal Interview, manuscripts)
• film/video/cd's
• TV or radio programs
• government publications
• pamphlets
• live presentations
• works of art.

Any one of these may need additional elements besides the basics presented in the examples above. You may have a corporate author, multiple authors, authors with the same last names, an anonymous author, an editor or editors, or a translator. 

The source may be a specific volume, edition, or part of a specific series. It may be a reprint. There may be other exceptions as well. For instance, you may want to cite an introduction, afterword, preface, foreword, a block quote, or a quote within a source (quoting secondhand).

 In other words, you may need to troubleshoot particular citations. Where do you go to find more information? 
See the link at the very top or the list that follows.
 

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.  4th ed.

 New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995. 

Harnack, Andrew and Eugene Kleppinger, eds. Online!: A Reference Guide

to Using Internet Sources. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 

-------------------------. "Beyond the MLA Handbook:  Documenting Electronic 

            Sources on the Internet." 

            <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/inbox/mla_archive.html> Accessed 20 

           Apr. 1998. 

 

Lester, James D. "Citing Cyberspace." Lkd. The Longman English 

Pages at "Online Citation Guides." 1997. <http://longman.awl.com/englishpages/>  Accessed 5 June 1998. 

 

Little & Brown Handbook. Do not number page one of your text, as it suggests.

Modern Language Association. "Citing Sources from the World 

Wide Web." Linked. MLA on the Web at "MLA Style." 7 April 1998. 

<http://www.mla.org/main_stl.htm#sources> Accessed 12 June 1998. 

Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens, eds. The Allyn and 

Bacon Handbook. 5th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997. 

Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." The New Feminist 

            Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory.  Elaine Showalter, 

            ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 

Troyka, Lynn Q. Simon & Schuster Quick Access Reference for Writers. 

              2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1998. 

Walker, Janice R. "Columbia Online Style: MLA-Style Citations of 

Electronic Sources." Vers. 1.2, Rev. Nov. 1997. <http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/mla.html> Accessed 5 June 1998.