The two most popular styles used in research papers are APA (American Psychological Association) 7th edition and MLA (Modern Language Association) 9th edition. APA is used in the areas of behavioral and social science. MLA is used in the humanities area.
There are formatting rules one follows when writing a research paper (margins, page numbers, titles, capitalization, etc.), creating in-text citations in the body of the paper, and writing full citations in the References or the Works Cited page (the last page). View the
APA or the
MLA sample paper. Some professors may ask you to submit your papers to
Turnitin, a plagiarism checking database.
You must have
both the in-text citations and the References or Works Cited page which is a list of all sources you used for your paper. There is an online citation builder,
NoodleTools, which you can use to create citations. You must log on through the library website in order to get free access.