Skip to Main Content

CCS 150 : Crunk Feminisms

Making sense of citations

Citations are key to participating in the scholarly community; they provide all of the information you need to find out more about a given source.

While citations can be formatted in a variety of styles (most often MLA, APA, or Chicago depending on the discipline) they contain common elements that you can recognize and use to determine if the citation is for a book, book chapter, journal article, newspaper article, or other source. Understanding what kind of item the citation is for can help you understand how and where to find it in the library catalog or database. 

For this course, you are asked to use MLA Style:

  • When citing any work, no matter what type or format, use a series of “core elements”.
  • Omit any core elements not relevant to the work.
  • In MLA style, "containers” describe how your source was published or made available to readers.

Core Elements, in order of placement in citation:

Note each element ends in a comma or a period:

  • Author.
  • Title of Source.
  • Title of Container,
  • Other Contributors,
  • Version,
  • Number,
  • Publisher,
  • Publication date,
  • Location.
  • Optional elements.

Below are some examples of MLA style citations, and some helpful tips for figuring out what the citation is for:

Book
Collins, Patricia Hill. From Black Power to Hip Hop : Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, Temple University Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ups/detail.action?docID=570537.
  • A clue for books is that the publisher's name and sometimes the location will always be included. 
  • Notice that the title of the book is indicated by italics. 
Book Chapter
Boylorn, Robin M. "Politics and policy: the personal is political." The Crunk Feminist Collection. Edited by Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Boylorn. The Feminist Press, 2017.
  • Here, notice the publisher's name, as well as quotation marks around the chapter name and italics for the book's title.
  • The presence of all three of these elements will help you understand that this is a book chapter. 
Journal Article

Durham, Aisha, et al. “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 721-37. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/668843. Accessed 21 Mar. 2025.
  • A great clue for journal articles is the presence of an issue/volume number (62) toward the end of the citation.
  • Again, notice the quotation marks which usually indicate either a book chapter or article title. 
Newspaper Article 
Fox, Lauren. "Prominent Black Feminist Brittney Cooper Charges Lawrence Audience to be ‘world Makers’ Not ‘space Takers’." Daily Journal World, 13 Sept. 2019, ProQuest. Web. 25 Mar. 2025 .
  • Newspapers may or may not include an author's name, but they will always include the title of the newspaper in italics and the location where it was published.
  • Newspaper citations often include the month, day, and year of publication. 

 

For additional citation types (music, media, etc.) in MLA style, see: