Books
MLA:
Thernstrom, Melanie. Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder.
[author, by last name.] [title.]
New York: Doubleday, 1997.
[city of publication: publisher, year.]APA:
Thernstrom, M. (1997). Halfway Heaven: diary of a Harvard murder.
[last name, initial.] [(year).] [title.]
New York: Doubleday.
[city of publication: publisher.]Chicago:
1. Thernstrom, Halfway Heaven, 83.
[fn. #.] [author last name, shortened title, page quoted.]
[Shortened Chicago reference; see More Notes on Chicago Style for more information.]
Note: Thernstrom’s book was published by the Doubleday Publishing Group, but the convention is to shorten the name by eliminating very common words that refer to publishers, such as “Book,” “Company,” or “Press.”
Also note: If the book contains chapters written by different authors, it may be an anthology, and so should be cited differently. See Books vs. Articles for more information.
OLDER WORKS
If the book you’re citing is being republished many years after it first appeared, you may want to include the original publication date to your listing, in addition to the new publication. This additional information lets the reader know more about the intellectual context of your source. The older your text, the more helpful it is to include this information. (If the book you’re using is a second or later edition, just add an abbreviation after the title, for instance, 2nd ed.) So in the example below, the particular edition of the Tempest being used was published in 1999; the writer has added the date “1604” to remind readers of the play’s first publication date.
MLA:
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1604. Ed. Peter Holland. New York: Penguin, 1999.
[author, by last name.] [title.] [“Ed.” editor, by first name.] [city: publisher, year.]APA:
Shakespeare, W. (1999). The tempest (P. Holland, Ed.). New York: Penguin.
[last name, initial.] [(year).] [title] [(editor, by initial, “Ed.”). ] [city: publisher.]
(Original work published 1604.)Chicago:
2. Shakespeare, Tempest, III, ii, 21.
[fn. #.] [author last name, title, act-scene-line for quoting plays.]
[Shortened Chicago reference; see More Notes on Chicago Style for more information.]
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