ENGL 101/102 Research Guide: Home

These links will lead you to Library resources your librarian recommends. You can find even more by visiting the library homepage at www.library.puc.edu.  

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. This is called a Works Cited list. You can see an example of a Works Cited list at the Purdue Online Writing Lab. 

Here are eight quick rules for this list:

1. Start a new page for your Works Cited list (e.g., if your paper is 4 pages long, start your Works Cited list on page 5).
2. Center the title, "Works Cited", at the top of the page and do not bold or underline it. Look for the alignment option in Word.
3. Double-space the list.
4. Start the first line of each citation at the left margin; each subsequent line should be indented (also known as a "hanging indent").
5. Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the citation. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
6. For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first name followed by a period.
7. Italicize the titles of full works: books, audiovisual material, websites.
8. Do not italicize titles of parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document. Instead, use quotation marks.

In the 7th edition of the Handbook, a separate set of citation instructions were given for each format type.  The problem with this approach is that there is no way to anticipate all format types a student may encounter.

To solve this problem, this new edition of the MLA Handbook provides a "universal set of guidelines" for citing sources across all format types.

These guidelines state that, if given, these major elements should be included in the citation:

1. Author.
2. Title of Source
3. Title of Container
4. Other Contributors
5. Version
6. Number
7. Publisher
8. Publication date
9. Location

Sometimes, elements 3-9 will repeat again, if say, your journal was inside a database.

Putting it all together:

What is a credible source?

Books you get from the library and articles you find in the library databases are almost always reliable and credible. Those books and articles have gone through an editorial process; someone with expertise checked the author's facts and arguments before the book or article was published. You can read more about credibility and reliability here.

Credible or Incredible?

It's always a good idea to apply the CRAAP test to any source you want to use in your research. This test is especially important if you find a source on the internet rather than through the library. 

When you find an article in the PUC databases or read a book or ebook from our collection, you can be fairly sure that they pass the CRAAP Test. Of course, you should check the publication date for Currency. 

Websites are a different story. It can be difficult to know whether information found online is reliable or not. The following video explains how to evaluate websites.