APA, MLA, Chicago. Websites, books, YouTube videos, AI chatbots. We have been through it all and written it down so you do not have to.
Published fabrication rates run from 7 percent to more than half. The warning signs of an invented reference, and the two minute check that settles it with a DOI.
The publisher city is gone, the author limits dropped, and ibid is retiring. Every citation change in the 18th edition, plus when Turabian 10th arrives.
The paper itself, not the citations. Margins, the seven approved fonts, the student title page line by line, all five heading levels and the reference page indent.
Parenthetical vs narrative, page numbers, twenty authors, no author, no date, the same author twice in one year, and the as cited in trap. The whole system in one place.
Author names, dates, capitalization, in-text citations, the reference page itself. Every real difference between the two big styles, with examples you can copy.
A PDF is a file format, not a source type. How to figure out what your PDF actually is, where the real publication details hide inside it, and how to cite it in all three styles.
The exact format, what to do when there is no author, no date, or no page title, and why most students get the retrieved date wrong.
Citing a YouTube video is weird because the author might be a person, a channel, or a corporation pretending to be a channel. Here is how to handle all of it.
Most students paste whatever looks like a link and hope for the best. DOIs and ISBNs are actually different and your citation format changes depending on which one you have.
Your professor said you can use AI but you still need to cite it. APA, MLA, and Chicago all have guidance on this now and they disagree on a few things. Here is what each one actually says.
OSCOLA is the citation style used in UK law schools and it is nothing like APA or MLA. Footnotes, no author-date format, and very specific rules for cases and legislation.
A bibliography is not just a list of sources. The format, ordering, and what counts as a source changes depending on your citation style. This covers all three main ones.
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