Writing Research Papers 

The first two sites below allow you to enter information about each reference in your paper and they will transform that reference into APA or MLA format. You can then copy and paste that into your paper. We also have the official APA manuals in the library as well as several handouts.

Also, remember that Word07 can format references using APA, MLA and other styles. When you need to enter a reference into your paper, click on "references" at the top, enter the citation style and click insert citation. It will then create an "in text" citation. It will also create a bibliograpy at the end of your paper. If you don't have Word07, an excellent substitute is bibme (see below).

There are three items to an APA paper. Here they are:

Title Page - This is an approved Title Page for the Hagerstown campus

Body of the Paper  Here is an approved body page (sometimes called discussion page). The body of the paper has these elements:

         in-text citation. You must cite any information or ideas you find in sources that are used in your paper. The "in-text" citation is in parenthesis and lists the author's last name first, a comma, and then the date. (Johnson, 2007). If there is no author, you list the title. For more explanation, click here.

References - This is an example of a reference list. It must be at the end of the paper on a separate page and arranged alphabetically by author. The 2nd and following lines of each reference is indented (called a hanging indent). If a reference has no author, it is arranged by the title. The basic format of all APA citations is author, date in parenthesis, and title. It looks like this: 

Johnson, J. (Jan 4, 2004). How to download music from the internet.

If there is no author, use the title. If there is no date put n.d. in the parenthesis like this (n.d.). Other information is added to this citation depending on the type of source. If it's from a magazine, you put the magazine's title, the volume, and the page number. If its from a website you also put the url: retrieved from http://www.youseemore.com/hbc. For a full explanation of creating references, click here.

To create a citation online and copy it to your paper, use Son of Citation Machine and follow the instructions.

For more information on citing references, see the following from the Purdue OWL website:

Reference List: Basic rules

Reference List: Author or Authors

Reference List: Articles in periodicals

Reference List: Books

Reference List: Other print sources

Reference List: Electronic sources

Reference List: Other non-print sources

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