Academic Series 1. How to Plan Your Academic Essay
A short guide to help you confidently tackle your academic paper assignments and make your writing process efficient and stress-free.
By Weava Team • 7 min read
Welcome to the fourth article of Weava’s Academic Series!
This Academic Series is a guide to help you confidently tackle your research and school assignments. The purpose of this guide is to help you gain knowledge on how to properly cite external sources in your written work. We will illustrate how Weava is designed to help you at this stage of writing as well!
We recommend you to read our previous article on How to Plan Your Academic Essay, Academic Reading, and How to Research Efficiently for more tips on academic reading and writing.
Citation is a key feature of academic writing. They are not considered optional but are requirements to enrich your research and to meet the standard of professionalism expected of academic writing. Citations are useful for a number of reasons, such as:
External sources should be cited in two ways – in the bibliography and in the in-text citations. Note that for academic research and writing, both the bibliography and in-text citations are required to be added in a proper format.
There are different citation styles used in academic writing. Below are some commonly used styles you should be familiar with:
Citation Style | Commonly Used Disciplines | In-text Citation Example | Bibliography example |
---|---|---|---|
APA (American Psychological Association) | Psychology, Education, Business, and Social Science | (Howard, 2007, p.3) | Howard, R. (2007). Understanding "Internet plagiarism." Computers and Composition, 24 (1), 3-15. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2006.12.005 |
Chicago Manual of Style | Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences | (Howard 2007, 3) | Howard, Rebecca. "Understanding 'Internet Plagiarism.'" Computers and Composition 24, no.1 (2007): 3-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2006.12.005. |
MLA (Modern Language Association) | Humanities | (Howard 3) | Howard, Rebecca. "Understanding 'Internet Plagiarism.'" Computers and Composition 24.1 (2007): 3-15. Science Direct. Web. |
Harvard | Education and Business | (Howard 2007, p.3) | Howard, R., 2007. Understanding "Internet plagiarism." Computers and Composition 24, 3-15. |
You should note that regardless of the citation styles, the elements below are always used:
Note that each citation style may take a different approach in specific situations such as citing a source with multiple authors, citing uncommon sources (e.g., song lyrics), or citing one source multiple times in the same paragraph. We recommend you to visit the sites below for their official guidelines.
Did you know that Weava has an in-built bibliography generator? Normally, you would have to spend much time roaming through your search history to revisit the articles you referred to and to manually create bibliography entries for each of them. With Weava, you can save time by generating your entire bibliography using its web dashboard.
After using Weava to highlight texts you want to make references to, all you need to do at Weava’s dashboard is to click “cite” for Weava to automatically generate the bibliography entry. You can choose different styles – APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard – and simply copy-paste the entry to your reference list. With all your research saved in one place, you can conveniently manage and consolidate your citations.
See the illustration below on generating citations with Weava, and begin saving time for your research work!
Weava is a great tool for students as it helps you to easily retain information and stay organized on the web. Weava is currently used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide in their academic journeys. If you haven’t already, consider downloading the Weava Chrome extension today.
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