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31 Disciplinary-Based Guidelines for Integrating Sources: Moving among APA, CMOS, and MLA

Meghan A Sweeney

Learning Objectives

By the end of the chapter, you will be able to

  • Identify the citation style appropriate for a particular discipline
  • Identify particular disciplines’ values
  • Differentiate between particular citation styles’ guidelines.

Citation Styles

Writers often get taught a useful technique for integrating sources into their writing: introduce the quote; quote the text; cite the source; and explain or analyze the quote. While this method for source integration is ethical and sound for writing in MLA, it is not the best approach for other citation styles, like APA and CMOS. As a writer, if you are using a different citation style, with that style comes an entirely new set of epistemologically-influenced writing expectations when integrating sources. This may seem overwhelming, but once you understand that disciplinary-based reading and writing hinge on the values of that particular major, it’s not a big leap to see how those values would also influence how source integration should happen. So let’s try to make some educated guesses on source integration based on our knowledge of values within each discipline.

First, let’s match the discipline or major with their use of a particular citation style in the following activity. (Note: you will need to consult with your professor to confirm what citation style is required for their specific course.)

Match the discipline or major to their citation style

Next, let’s consider the different values and activities of each of these groupings. What are the similarities in how English and theology make and share knowledge? What are similar values shared by history, politics, anthropology, and sociology? What do psychology and biology have in common? The answers to these questions will lead us to understanding how the disciplines prefer to integrate their sources.

Match the values with the discipline

Finally, we can use this information for a final step of these activities: to use our knowledge of these disciplinary values, what they value in their sources, to understand the guidelines around source integration. Each citation style has its own expectations when it comes to integration.

Match the values of a discipline and its citation style with the guidelines for source integration

We hope that you can see how the expectations your readers will have for source integration and citation style choice are directly related to the values, or making and sharing knowledge (epistemologies) of your particular major. Those majors that use MLA typically value close reading, textual analysis, and linguistic analysis. Therefore, when integrating sources, they value quoting words directly. Those majors that use APA typically value findings and methodologies of various research studies. As a result, they want writers to paraphrase (put the text into their own words) the findings and methodologies. We typically find no direct quotation in writing using APA.  Finally, majors that use CMOS typically value using a wide variety of types of evidence, moving among primary sources that are complex to cite quickly. Since the writing would be cumbersome and distracting to try to introduce and cite sources, they use a footnote and endnote method. Readers can move quickly through the text and look at the footnotes for details on where the source is from.

A Closer Look at Paraphrases, Quotes, and Footnotes

Let’s look at a few examples and discuss the features that make the source integration uniquely MLA, APA, or CMOS.

APA

Excerpt from “#Domestic Violence Isn’t Stopping for Coronavirus …….”: Intimate Partner Violence Conversations on Twitter during the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic”

In the U.S., police departments in ten major metropolitan cities – Portland, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Omaha, and Kansas City –reported double-digit percentage spikes in IPV compared to the previous year (Bosman, 2020; Tolan, 2020). Compared to March 2019, March 2020 witnessed a 27% jump in IPV arrests in Portland, Oregon; a 22% increase in domestic assault and battery reports in Boston, Massachusetts; and a 21% spike in reports of IPV in Seattle, Washington. Furthermore, text messages to IPV hotlines have skyrocketed since it is a safer way to ask for help when the victim is in close proximity to the abuser (Bosman, 2020). Numerous media outlets, news channels, and social media pages report how this pandemic has negatively affected IPV victims (Campbell, 2020; Godin, 2020; Gupta & Stahl, 2020). Researchers and practitioners expect that the actual number of IPV cases is much higher since many victims may have been unable to report the abuse due to their proximity to the abuser (Selvaratnam, 2020; Southall,2020).

Prolonged confinement with abusers during the shelter-in-place orders may have led to increased fear and emotional distress among victims. Being exposed to persistent fear has long-term harmful impacts on victims’ mental health (Gupta & Stahl, 2020). Additionally, the pandemic has created several new stressors related to health, employment, and financial burden on individuals. The pandemic and the accompanying tumultuous stress may have also led to increased consumption of alcohol and gun possession in the home for security reasons, which could all ultimately impact IPV in the household (Bosman, 2020; Campbell, 2020; Piquero et al., 2020; Snyder, 2020). Therefore, IPV has become a cause of growing concern nationally and internationally since the pandemic began.

Using this excerpt as a guide, reflect on the following questions:

  1. What is the ratio between direct quotation and paraphrase?
  2. How do they introduce a source?

You should notice that there is no direct quotation (i.e, text inside of quotation marks). There is only paraphrasing (i.e., the writer putting the research into their own words). They introduce sources directly with the definitions, findings, and content of the research. There is no focus on the text name or the author/researcher. (As you may recall from the chapter on discourse communities, these disciplines do not worry about sourcing, or the ideologies and biases of the authors. The authors of the piece are fairly insignificant to readers of APA.)  Finally, the paraphrase is ended with the last name of the author and the year.

Let’s try another to see if these guidelines hold up:

Excerpt from “Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?| Third-Space K-Drama: Netflix, Hallyu, and the Melodramatic Mundane.”

The series extension reflects the American multi-seasonal TV model (Mittell, 2015). Squid Game’s (Hwang, 2021) narrative and meta-textual capitulation to the spectacle it would seem to interrogate also exhibits the triumph of Americanization. As media scholars have observed, digitally rendered spectacles are a Hollywood trademark (J. Kim, 2019; Ok, 2009), and visual effects are prominently displayed in Squid Game’s sensationalist games and flashy arenas, particularly the Tug-of-War and Glass Bridge (Licuria & Dixon, 2021). Both games recall the height, dexterity, and physical strength of extreme sports. Their breathless consumption by the international VIPs within the show and the global audiences of the show allegorizes contemporary mass sporting events, long “a domain of the spectacle” and an instrument of “Americanized globalization” (Kellner, 2003, pp. 5, 69). “The Squid Game funded and enjoyed by the global VIPs,” Kim and Park (2022) argued, “exemplifies a McDonaldized stadium” (p. 7).

Co-opted by this regime of the spectacular, Squid Game’s (Hwang, 2021) conspicuously Korean signifiers—traditional children’s games, retro street foods, and stylized stage sets like the fabricated golmok (alley)—reinforce rather than disrupt the logic of cultural homogenization, exemplifying Netflix’s “functionalist recruitment of hybridity as an economic variable” (Kraidy, 2005, p. 90). This “corporate transculturalism” (Kraidy, 2005, p. 90) strategy paid off. In its wake, Squid Game sparked a craze for dalgona candy and piqued international interest in Ddakji and Ojingeo Nori, while its flashy costumes became highly sought-after Halloween merchandise

Using this excerpt from Communications as a guide, reflect on the following questions:

  1. What is the ratio between direct quotation and paraphrase? How is it different from the previous example?
  2. How do they introduce a source?

In this example, we see that there still is some direct quotation. While still predominantly relying upon paraphrases of the sources, this author does quote some sources directly, focusing on key terms and phrases. This distinction between the first and second example adds a complication to our description of source integration, but it still aligns with our analysis that source integration expectations within a discipline still is guided by the values (or whats of making and sharing knowledge) in that discipline. If you put the APA majors on a continuum from those that conduct textual analysis (and may want to quote directly) and those that do not, you would find that communication is the most likely (as compared to biology, chemistry, environmental science, psychology) to use textual analysis. Therefore, some disciplines using APA may still quote directly.

There are no rules for source integration, only ways of sharing knowledge, or sources

We hope you see that the rules around source integration are not rule-based, but instead epistemologically-based.

MLA

Excerpt from “‘Nah, We Straight’: An Argument Against Code Switching”

Justice Billings Brown, who delivered the majority opinion in the case upholding segregation, wrote that the “assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority” was a false and mistaken view. He continues: “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it” (Thomas 33). In dispute of this notion, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued 58 years later in the case that opened the way for desegregation that “separate is inherently unequal.” The badge of inferiority that was stamped upon blacks racially and that remains attached to black speech was and is not contrived by blacks. The evidence that they were considered racially inferior then as their speech is now resides in their experience in school where, as Graff writes, they are “urged to use Black English on the streets and formal English in school while keeping these languages separate” (27). Graff believes code switching is a misguided approach and argues: “Linguistic integration is better than segregation” (27).

Similarly, literacy scholar Catherine Prendergast substantiates Graff’s view in her study Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. The Board of Education (2003), which uncovers the segregationist practices that still inform the instruction of black students. As she explains, educational institutions still constitute a “site of racial injustice in America” (2), making literacy teachers accomplices, often unwittingly, in the continuation of racial inequality.

Using this excerpt as a guide, reflect on the following questions:

  1. What is the ratio between direct quotation and paraphrase? How is it different from the previous example?
  2. How do they introduce a source?

As a reader, I notice that there is much more discussion of the texts and more direct quotation of what writers say. Additionally, the writer takes longer to introduce texts and situate their importance to the analysis.

CMOS

Excerpt from “Culture clash: Foreign oil and indigenous people in northern Veracruz, Mexico, 1900–1921.”

Native workers successfully brought the well under control in March 1911, but three years later the indigenes would again experience the power of Potrero del Llano No. 4. On August 14, 1914, lightning ignited the gas escaping from cracks in the well. “All the available workmen, to the number of 3,000, were immediately mobilized and armed with shovels,” wrote Arthur B. Clifford, the fire expert on the scene. Upon arriving at the scene, Francisco Solís Cabrera, a fire fighter and former oil worker, found “nothing but little Indians [puros inditos]” working in hellish conditions.36

This experience and the continuing exploitation encouraged native radicalization. In late 1914, the entire Mexican work force in the area organized itself and staged what Clifford labelled a “strike.” For eight days, “about fifty white men had to take the duties of 3,ooo natives,” who had set up “the Mexican equivalent of pickets” demanding an increase in pay and other benefits. At the end of the week, they won both and returned to work.37


36.Arthur B. Clifford, “Extinguishing an Oil-Well Fire in Mexico, and the Part Played Therein by Self-Contained Breathing-Apparatus,” Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers 63 (1921): 3; Francisco SolÍs Cabrera, interview by Lief Adleson, Tampico, Tamaulipas, 7 and 18 September 1976, PHO/4/56 INAH, PHO; A. E. Chambers, “Potrero No. 4: A History of One of Mexico’s Earliest and Largest Wells,” Journal of the Institution of Petroleum Technologists 9 (1923): 148.

37. Clifford, “Extinguishing an Oil-Well Fire,” 8; Chambers, “Potrero No. 4,” 149-50.

Using this excerpt as a guide, reflect on the following questions:

  1. What is the ratio between direct quotation and paraphrase?
  2. How are the sources integrated?
  3. What is unique about CMOS?

The writer for CMOS uses a mix of paraphrasing and quotation, similar to what we saw in MLA. The significant difference here is that the sources are identified with a superscript number linking to an endnote in the document. These endnotes list multiple primary and secondary sources used in the narrative that the professor is composing. This type of writing is common in history and demands a clean way to cite sources that keeps the narrative clean, while offering readers a full understanding of all the evidence used to construct the narrative.

Reflection

Take a few moments to reflect on what your major and minor is. What are the shared values in that discipline? How do you think they affect the integration of source expectations in your major and minor? Finally, do some research to see what citation method is most commonly used in your major and minor. Why do you think that is the one?

Practice paraphrasing and quoting

Now that we have established that how you paraphrase and quote is affected by your citation methods, let’s look at some good advice on how to do that.  We recommend reading Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism by Steven D. Krause from another OER, Oregon Writes Open Text.

Connection to Embodied Rhetorics

If we can continue to connect the best practices for integrating sources into our writing, as not a disembodied process of following rules, but rather a socially connected practice that bridges your own goals as a writer with the norms and expectations of a community of which you are a part

Works Cited

APA

Rai, A., Choi, Y. J., Cho, S., Das, U., Tamayo, J., & Menon, G. M. (2021).#Domestic Violence Isn’t Stopping for Coronavirus …….”: Intimate Partner Violence Conversations on Twitter during the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work19(1), 108–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/26408066.2021.1964671

Yuan, Y. (2023). Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?| Third-Space K-Drama: Netflix, Hallyu, and the Melodramatic Mundane. International Journal of Communication17, 25.

MLA

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “” Nah, we straight”: An argument against code switching.” Jac (2009): 49-76.

CMOS

Santiago, Myrna. “Culture clash: Foreign oil and indigenous people in northern Veracruz, Mexico, 1900–1921.” The Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 62-71.

License

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Writing Our Bodies Copyright © by Sunayani Bhattacharya; Gina Kessler Lee; Meghan A Sweeney; and Yin Yuan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.