Citation and Style Guides
Visit the websites of the American Psychological Association, the Modern Language Association or the Chicago Manual of Style to learn more about there purpose, function and uses.
The style of the American Psychological Association (APA) is primarily used in scientific literary works. They, like the MLA produce guidelines that dictate the accepted norms for basic and advanced literary work. The majority of the work done in the APA style has to do with the disciplines of the sciences, social sciences and mathematics. As well, the APA has not yet produced guidelines concerning publishing on the web, but has developed their own style of documentation that is very different than that of the MLA or the Chicago Press.
If you intend on publishing a work on the web that should be using APA style and are unsure how, dont fret. There are many APA style documents that have been published to the web, and the majority of them have little or no graphical design and have published their work much in the same way they would on paper.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) has been for decades one of the leading developers in language and literature studies. They have produced a numbers of writing guides that contain thouroughly accepted standards that are taught from middle school on through to post-secondary education. The MLA documentation style has been used throughout the scholarly demographic especially in the humanities academia, and has been especially influential in the publishing world having developed and implemented standards that put into place a system in which information can be easily accessed, managed, verified and accredited.
The style of the MLA can be easily defined as that used to develop scholarly manuscripts and research papers, and primarily deals with the conventions of grammar, puncuation, quotation and the use of proper citations of documented sources. Because much of the scholoraly work being published today has yet to make it to a legitimate web forum, many of the MLA styles have not yet been evolved to suit online mediums. Because of this many works being published directly to the web have not taken on the form of the traditional website, usually appearing much like the document would had it been in print form. However, some scholars have taken it upon themselves to provide links to thier sources within the works cited lists, as well have converted the traditional in text citation over to a link that acts as an anchor to the full citation at the end of the document. We find these types of digital citing commonly in documents prepared in .pdf or in html format.
The Chicago Manual of style began in the late 1800's as a single document intended for use by editors at the University of Chicago Press. By 1906 it had grown into a full fledge book and is know found in homes and in the school-house around the world. The intention of the Manual of Style was to provide readers and writers with guidelines that could be used universally in college level work.