How to make citations

Basic examples

• When citing your own paper from another course or an assignment from the same course:

  Ramsey, Alice (2000, Fall). Locke's views on mathematical truth. Unpublished manuscript, Carnegie Mellon University, Nature of Reason.

  (The last part is the name of the course for which the assignment was submitted.)

• When citing a journal article:

  Wang, Hao (1957). The axiomatization of arithmetic. Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol.22, no.2. pages 145-58.

• For citing the textbook:

  Barwise, Jon and John Etchemendy (1996). The Language of First-Order Logic, Third revised and expanded edition, CSLI, Stanford, CA.

• For citing materials (i.e. Handouts, etc.) used in class:

  Schlimm, Dirk (2002, January 28). Handout #1: Terminology for Proofs and Arguments. Carnegie Mellon University, Nature of Mathematical Reasoning.

• When citing a professor's idea or comment from lecture:

  Schlimm, Dirk (2002, February 4). Lecture 9: On Proofs by Contradiction. Carnegie Mellon University, Nature of Mathematical Reasoning.

• When referring to a conversation with somebody:

  Van Zandt, Steven (2000, April 26). Conversation with the author.

• To cite a webpage:

  O'Connor, J.J. and E. F. Robertson, Euclid of Alexandria, The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/References/Euclid.html (Accessed March 4, 2002)

  To practice a critical approach to information available on the web, here is a Tutorial for evaluating information on the web by Carnegie Mellon University Libraries (takes 30 minutes).

• If they want to pull an idea from the popular media, such as a TV show or a film:

  Sullivan, Ed (1964, June 6). The Ed Sullivan Show. CBS.

Instead of writing the year in brackets after the name, you can also write it at the end of the citation (without brackets).

More information

Please follow this link to David Sztybel Teaching aids for more detailed explanations on how to cite your sources (items 2 and 3).