Citing Sources

By properly citing the sources you use in your research projects, you are both identifying the resources that you used to complete your work and formally acknowledging the authors or creators of those resources. This allows others to find what you have found and to verify your research.

Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity

APA citation style

  • Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.) CU Library Reference locations include Africana, Hotel, Management, Olin, and Uris Libraries at call number: BF 76.7 .P83x 2001x. Also in ILR and Mann Reference at BF 76.7 .A51 2001.

You can also use citation management software like Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote; they do an excellent job of formatting citations and bibliographies in whatever style you want

Citation Management Software

Organize and Cite Easily with Citation Managers

Save time and cite properly!

Citation management programs are like EasyBib or NoodleTools on steroids and allow you to easily collect, manage, and organize your citations and work with databases (and often Word or other word processors), making it easy to import references and incorporate them into your writing, properly formatted in the style of your choice. 

From the programs that Cornell supports, you can use EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley.

  • EndNote is available for purchase at the Cornell Store. Two Cornell colleges offer their communities free access to Endnote via site license: Human Ecology and Agriculture & Life Sciences.
  • Zotero and Mendeley are free and open source programs.

For more information on citation tools, citation management, and available workshops, see the Citation Management page on the Library site.

Citing Data from a Database in APA Format

If your database doesn't give you a citation format for APA already, here are examples of the standard citation style for this:

Data set from a database

Bloomberg L.P. (2008). Return on capital for Hewitt Packard 12/31/90 to 09/30/08. Retrieved Dec. 3, 2008, from Bloomberg database.
Central Statistics Office of the Republic of Botswana. (2008). Gross domestic product per capita 06/01/1994 to 06/01/2008 [statistics]. Available from CEIC Data database.