Step 3: Use your preferred style to finish your reference

View the most recent version.

The examples in this guide have been adapted to reflect the order, capitalization, punctuation, formatting and other style matters recommended for references in Statistics Canada's style guide.

However, your publisher, institution, corporation or government department may require you to follow particular citation guidelines and can advise you on the appropriate style guide to follow. This could be a published manual—such as those put out by the American Psychological Association, the University of Chicago and the Modern Language Association—or your organization's own inhouse style guide, which likely draws on several sources.

You can easily adapt your references to your required style. What is most important is to include in a citation the essential elements that will enable your readers to find the original source. How these elements are ordered, capitalized, italicized or punctuated is a matter of style and so can vary.

To refer the reader to the source of an idea, a quotation, a fact or other information, you can use a simple author–date text citation in your text. Then you need cite the full source only once, in the bibliography or reference list.

Another way of presenting references is to use footnotes or endnotes.

Regardless of the specific bibliographic style you may be required to follow, this guide will help you build solid, useful references for your statistical sources.