Step 3
Use your preferred style to finish your reference

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

Point your reader to your citations
Whether you choose to list your citations in a bibliography or reference list, or to present them as footnotes or endnotes, you must indicate others' ideas, quotations, facts or other information in your publication and point the reader to their sources.

For citations in a bibliography or reference list, use author–date text citations in your text. You need to cite each full source only once, in the bibliography or reference list.

For citations presented in footnotes or endnotes, use a superscript note marker in the text to lead to a note with the corresponding number. This way of presenting references can result in repetition when there are many references and so it is best used when there are very few references in the text.

Many style guides offer information on the presentation of author–date text citations, footnotes and endnotes.