There are several different citation styles and it can be confusing! You may need to use several different styles throughout a semester depending on which discipline your course lays within; your professor will let you know which style you must use for your assignments. Fortunately, there are many resources available that offer guidance, examples, and instructions for creating bibliographic citations, in-text citations, and paper formatting for particular styles.
In addition to the resources suggested in this infoguide, if you have any questions concerning citation styles, do not hesitate to contact your RIT subject librarian for help!
Contact information for all librarians can be found here:
Citation guidelines are constantly being updated. In addition, as emerging technologies enter the information arena how to cite these new entitles are being addressed. Within this infoguide, you can find current discussions, recommendations, and formal guidelines that address the ever evolving realm of citations.
With the emergence of information derived via AI products, citation styles are beginning to respond. See below for current discussions and recommendations for how APA,MLA, and Chicago are addressing this new technology.
This infoguide now has a subpage dedicated to citation issues in relation to ASL interpreting. Refer to the page listed on the left for this guidance.
For A.I.-generated visual content, citation practices may vary among style guides and depend on specific requirements set by A.I. tool developers. MLA and Chicago have provided guidance and more comprehensive instructions from other style guide providers are anticipated soon. Until then, refer to the general rules of each style guide for citing images.
Several lawsuits for copyright infringement are pending against companies behind some of the A.I. image creation tools on the market. Depending on the respective outcome, there may be developing advise on how to use A.I. created visual art.
The start of 2023 brought to the public a wave of AI related tools. Depending on how you are using these tools you might need to cite them in your research. Because many of these tools are extremely new formal citation styles like MLA and APA have not yet added guidance to their published manuals.
This is common! Citation is always evolving as new types of items emerge to cite. Both MLA and APA are actual organizations which work year round to streamline and add new items to their recommended styles. The manuals for each represent the current guidance but there is a whole process before a citation style format reaches the manual.
One step in that process is interim guidance which can usually be found on the style blogs.
For example the MLA interim guidance for citing a generative AI tool that generates text like ChatGPT or one that generates a visual image like DALL-E can be found at this link on the MLA blog.
You can also email APA at StyleExpert@apa.org to pose a question if you do not see answers on the sites above.
Use of RIT resources is reserved for current RIT students, faculty
and staff for academic and teaching purposes only.
Please contact your librarian with any questions.
