The primary reasons for citing sources in a research paper are to give credit to the authors whose work you have drawn upon and to allow readers to track down your sources, should they wish to do so.
There are many style guides for formatting citations and creating bibliographies. Turabian (a simplified version of Chicago) is frequently used, but you may be called upon to use others.
See the box at the right for tools to help you format citations and bibliographies.
Many of these resources were suggested by the Columbia University Libraries