Keeping track of sources, creating references and crediting the work of others is not the most exciting part of research but it is essential.  Authors owe their readers a duty to cite the following:

  • other's ideas that inform your writing
  • facts that are not common knowledge to your audience
  • quotations
  • paraphrases
  • reprinted or adapted images, figures or tables

Good citation practices protect authors against claims of plagiarism, an ethical breach that occurs when a writer takes credit for anothers work.  

Norms around giving credit where credit is due vary by discipline and by publication type or manner of writing. Many scholarly business publications prescribe the use of the American Psychological Association (APA) citation style, whereas many practice or trade oriented business publications dispense with formal citations altogether and opt for including simple source statements.

Even if you are writing a practice style business report, because you are doing so in an academic setting and your professors need to be able to easily check the sources used, you should faithfully apply APA rules to your writing.

It is sometimes challenging to apply APA citation rules to business sources because many of the most common sources don't correspond closely to the examples of mostly scholarly publications given as examples.

This guide offers examples of how to make references and parentetical or narrative citations for common business sources in our collection and found on the free web and frequently cited by students for business and marketing plans.