Conduct your research and make notes of which works you wish to reference. Mark these in a manner you see fit. This could be through sticky notes, dog-earring pages or another method.
Write your paper and come to the point where need to either quote or paraphrase source material.
Look up the type of source in your MLA or APA handbook. This will depend on how the material was originally published. Online PDF documents are treated differently from book chapters or essay articles.
Write out your reference. If you are merely paraphrasing ideas or facts and not directly quoting the source, put a parenthetical citation at the end of the borrowed material. For MLA style, this includes last name and page number. For example, (Collegestudent 93). For APA style, you need the name, year and page number as identified by the letter "p." For example, (Collegestudent, 2011 p. 93).
Insert a citation containing the author's name in the context of your paper for direct quotations, and follow it with a page number for MLA. For example: As A. Collegestudent writes, "You should directly quote ideas and not facts" (93).
Split the page number and the year, if using APA, and list the author's name. For example: As A. Collegestudent (2011) writes, "Always paraphrase facts and quote metaphors and abstract ideas" (p. 93).