10 Style Guides for Writers, Authors and Editors

Style guides provide writers and non-writers with a manual of rules for writing, formatting and creating documents. They govern consistency and uniformity. Many of us have used a style guide in school, such as APA Style, MLA Style or Chicago Manual of Style, to format and cite sources for a thesis, dissertation or research paper. You may have used a style guide when you composed an article for a journal, magazine or website. Some of us who copy edit or proofread for publishers use either a common style guide or the publisher's in-house style to ensure all written materials are consistent in substance and structure.

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Free Online Tools to Cite Sources and Format References for Your Paper

These free tools will help you cite, format and organize your references in APA Style, MLA Style or Chicago/Turabian Style, as well as automatically create your Bibliography page, Works Cited Page or References List page.

No matter what type of paper you're writing (i.e. dissertation, thesis, or research paper), your teacher or publisher will request that you follow specific guidelines based on one of the above styles. Each style has numerous rules for citing and formatting different sources, such as books, newspapers, websites, journals, and so on. Referencing an article or a journal has a different format than referencing an article or a magazine. A journal article with more than six authors has a different format than a journal article with five authors. Different formats also exist between online and offline sources.

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APA Style: Understanding DOI Identifiers to Cite Online Sources

The American Psychological Association (the organization that governs APA style) and most college professors recommend using a DOI number (digital object identifier ) when you cite material from an online source.

A DOI identifier looks like this:

A DOI is unique to a specific work. The publisher is responsible for attaching a DOI number to an article when it publishes and distributes the article digitally. This number never changes, unlike a website's address or URL which may change or disappear over time. A DOI provides a fixed "address" to its online destination and helps readers pinpoint the specific source.

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