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Puerto Rican Studies Subject Guide — Citing Sources

Topics and resources for Puerto Rican Studies

Citing Sources

Puerto Rican Studies is an interdisciplinary field, and it uses multiple citation styles from the humanities and social sciences including APA, Chicago, and MLA. Among these, the citation style that scholars and students use depends on the specific discipline and audience of their work. Although each style has a different format and emphasizes different aspects of citations, they all have the same goal of acknowledging sources and providing a record for future scholars to be able to locate the original source. 

UConn Library Understand Citations Guide

UConn Library Understand Citations GuideUConn Library's Understand Citation Guide is a good place to start for citation resources. It includes information on how and when to cite, how to use APA, Chicago, and MLA citation styles, and how to avoid plagiarism.

Citation Guides and Management Tools Guide

UConn Library Citation GuidesUConn Library's Citation Guides and Management Tools Guides includes useful information about citing in APA, Chicago, and APA. It also offers resources for managing citations (for example Zotero and RefWorks).

Purdue Owl

Purdue OWL LogoThe Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) includes helpful information about using APA, Chicago, and MLA citation styles. 

MLA Citations for Spanish-Language Texts

When citing Spanish-language texts, note that only the first words and proper nouns are capitalized. For example, the title of Manuel Zeno Gandía's 1894 novel should be written as La charca (not La Charca). This does not apply to journal titles, where all words in the title are capitalized (for example, Estudios Caribeños). The Waidner-Spahr Library at Dickenson College offers a useful guide for MLA Citations in Spanish.

Using Stable Links in Citations

MLA recommends including a URL or web address to help readers locate sources. MLA only requires the www. address, so eliminate all https:// when citing URLs. If a DOI (digital object identifier) is available, cite the DOI number instead of the URL.

Examples:

Rivera Villegas, Carmen M. "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: Reinvenciones romanticas de un canon fundacional.” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, p. 62, www.jstor.org/stable/27923253. Accessed 20 May 2009.

or

Rivera Villegas, Carmen M. "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: Reinvenciones romanticas de un canon fundacional.” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, p. 62, JSTOR, doi:10.1353/mfs.1997.0056.

If the permalink contains https://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url= (as in many databases)  remove the entire prefix from your citation. Just keep the URL that follow the equal sign (=) for the citation.