Make a claim without a quote.

Claim (Citation).

Example:

Some view cities as the storehouse of culture and creativity, and propose that urbanization is a consequence of the attractiveness of these social benefits (Mumford, 1961).

More below

Make a claim without a quote.

Oftentimes you do not need to directly quote a source to convey its conclusions or arguments – and some disciplines discourage quoting directly! Rather you can paraphrase the main point of a paper in your own words and provide an in-text citation. A benefit of using this strategy is that you can offer support for a claim without using a whole paragraph to introduce and frame a quote. You should make sure that you fully understand the paper's argument and that you are following university citation guidelines before attempting to paraphrase something from a paper. For aditional resources on paraphrasing click here.

Make a claim that is supported by two or more sources.

Claim (Citation 1; Citation 2).

Example:

Reviews of this literature concede difficulty in making direct comparisons of emission levels across different sets of analysis (Bader and Bleischwitz, 2009; Kennedy et al., 2009; Ramaswami et al., 2012).

More below

Make a claim that is supported by two or more sources.

Sometimes there’s not just one source that perfectly supports your claim, or there are two major publications that deserve credit for providing evidence on a topic. This is a perfect time to use multiple citations. You can cite two, three, or more sources, but remember to cite only the publications that are most prominent so as not to clutter up your paper.

Make a claim that has been supported in multiple contexts.

Context 1 (Citation), Context 2 (Citation), Context 3 (Citation).

Example:

These results are supported by more recent research on transportation energy consumption (Liddle, 2014), electricity consumption in buildings (Lariviere and Lafrance, 1999), and overall urban GHG emissions (Marcotullio et al., 2013b).

More below

Make a claim that has been supported in multiple contexts.

Use this citation strategy when you want to show that a body of research has found support for some claim across several different contexts. This can show the robustness of an effect or phenomenon and can give your claim some added validity.

Quote important or unique terms.

Claim "Term"(Citation).

Example:

The spatial implications of this thinking are manifest in the "concentric ring model" of urban expansion and its variants (Harris and Ullman, 1945).

More below

Quote important or unique terms.

While block or even whole-sentence citations are rare in most research papers in the science and social science disciplines, there is often a need to quote specific terms or phrases that were first coined by a certain source or that were well-explained in a specific paper.

Use a direct quotation.

Introduce quote, "Quotation." (Citation)

Example:

China’s "radical” urbanization has underpinned the country’s economic growth and has been key to the nation’s economic growth strategy (McGranahan et al., 2014).

More below

Use a direct quotation.

The appropriateness of quoting directly from a text varies widely across fields and document types. However, if it makes sense for your field and your purpose, a direct quotation can bring attention to specific language in your source.

Summarize your source.

You will help your reader understand your points better if you summarize the key points of a study. Describe the strengths or weaknesses a specific source that has been pivotal in your field. Describe the source's specific methodology, theory, or approach. Be sure to still include a citation. If you mention the name of the author in your text, you still need to provide the date of the study in a parenthetical citation.

See an example

Summarize your source.

The studies of Newman and Kenworthy (1989, 1999) demonstrate a negative relationship between population density and transportation fuel use.

Cite a method.

This is an easy way to give credit to a source that has provided some evidence for the vailidity of a method or questionaire. Readers can reference your citation if they are interested in knowing more about the method and its standing in the current literature.

See an example

Cite a method.

Despite the popularity of the WUP indicators, they have been routinely criticized because the methodology relies on local- and country-specific definitions of bounding urban areas, resulting in of ten incomparable and widely divergent definitions of the population, density thresholds, or administrative/political units designated (Sat-terthwaite, 2007).

Compare sources.

This is one of the most important techniques for creating an effective literature review. This allows you and your readers to consider controversies and discrepancies among the current literature, revealing gaps in the literature or points of contension for further study.

See an example

Compare sources.

Some evidence for this scalling relationship suggests that urban areas with larger population sizes have proportionally smaller energy infrastructures than smaller cities (Bettencourt et al., 2007; Fragkias et al., 2013). Other evidence suggests that GHG emissions may increase more than proportionally to population size, such that larger cities exhibit proportionally higher energy demand as they grow than do smaller cities (Marcotullio et al., 2013).