Style Guide

This guide was designed to provide you with assistance in citing your sources when writing an academic paper.

What is a citation and citation style?

A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and combat plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author's name, date, location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifer).

A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting.

There are many different styles for citing resources from your research. Eternity Bible College uses Turabian/Chicago Citation Style which is generally used by the fields of History, Biblical Studies, and Fine Arts. 

Based on Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Turabian's citation style presents two basic documentation systems, notes-bibliography style and author-date style. These styles are essentially the same as those presented in The Chicago Manual of Style with slight modifications for the needs of student writers.

Notes-Bibliography Method

• Sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes.
• Each note corresponds to a raised (superscript) number in the text.
• Sources are also usually listed in a separate bibliography. 

Author-Date Method

• Sources are briefly cited in the text, usually in parentheses, by author’s last name and year of publication.
• Each citation in the text matches up with an entry in a reference list, where full bibliographic information is provided.

If you’re not sure which method you should use, ask your instructor. 

Good scholarship requires learning and borrowing from outside sources. This is an important part of academics. But the difference between diligent scholarship and plagiarism often comes down to each student's diligence in citing the words or ideas that he or she is utilizing. Be careful to include all of the necessary citation information-both in the body of your paper and on the Works Cited page. For more on plagiarism, see the Student Handbook.

Whether you’re using the notes and bibliography or author-date style, you should always cite:

• direct quotations

• paraphrases and summaries

• information and ideas that are not common knowledge or are not available in a standard reference work (like a dictionary)

• any borrowed material—published or unpublished—that might appear to be your own if there were no citation.

As you do your research, you may want to consider using one of a number of available citation management tools to collect data about your sources. Programs like EndNote, Easybib, and Zotero are designed to help you by capturing this information and adding it to a library of citations, where it is filtered by source type and can be further organized by research topic or paper. You can also add sources into your paper as needed in one of the citation styles described here.