This page provides a few entry points for students getting started with college-level research. The goal here it to move beyond a Google search and begin searching intentionally for excellent material.
Additional titles are also available through Amazon Prime and Netflix. Students should be aware that the libraries can't acquire licenses for those titles.
Historians usually use the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS, currently in the 17th edition) to format their bibliographies and notes. While it is possible to format your notes and bibliography by hand, most of us use a citation manager, often Zotero, to help organize their notes.
This guide is designed to get you started with some of the basic types of documents you might need to cite in a paper. Scholars cite to their sources for two main reasons: 1) To acknowledge the material they are drawing on. 2) To provide evidence, allowing readers to follow their research.
There are two Chicago citation formats: notes-bibliography and author-date. Most historians use notes-bibliography, so that's the format described on this page. When using the Chicago Manual of Style or any other citation guide, make sure you follow instructions for notes-bibliography.
Note: You should acknowledge where you got your information whether you quote, paraphrase, or summarize. That means using footnotes in almost every paragraph in your paper except your conclusion. If unsure, ask your librarian or professor.
If these online resources don't answer your question, use a print handbook in BC Libraries.
