Research Basics

Most assignments will require using American Psychological Association (APA) Style of writing and citations. Due to how important this topic is to your studies, we created a separate Research Guide just for APA formatting.

If you are required to use the American Medical Associations (AMA) Style of writing and citations, you can refer to the AMA guide.

Many databases and articles will offer links that include citation assistance featuring labels like "Cite this article" or "Cite this". Also, citation exporting websites and software exist that offer to perform your citations. Beware of using citation exporting links, websites, and software. These formatting tools can only use information based upon how it appears in the digital documentation of the resource, which may not have been entered using the formatting that you need for your citations. For example, if you are using APA style and the article you want to cite is something like "Researching the Links between Heart and Lung Diseases", the citation exporters will not decapitalize the title, which should be cited "Researching the links between heart and lung disease" in proper APA format. These shortcut tools could cost you correct citations, so be careful!

Annotated bibliographies consist of citations of sources and evaluations (annotations) of those sources. Different style guides offer different requirements for how to format these bibliographies, including whether or not to include a title page, the length of the annotations, or whether or not a separate References/Works Cited page is necessary. When composing these helpful research tools, either for an assignment or as a valuable way to organize your sources for a larger assignment, consult the formatting style, the assignment guidelines, and your purpose for creating the document.