Gather the bibliographic data of your source. If the paper you're citing appears in a journal, you'll need to know the name of the journal, the title and author of the paper, the volume and issue number of the journal and the page numbers on which the paper appears. If it's in a book, you'll need to know the title and author of the paper, the title and editor of the book, the publisher, the place of publication and the page numbers on which the paper appears.
Find out which citation style your university, department or school uses. There are several different citation styles in use, each with a number of differences from the others. One of the most common in the humanities is the citation format published by the Modern Languages Association or MLA.
Insert references into your work as you write. Every time you cite the source, include a reference. This may take the form of a footnote, endnote or in-text citation. The MLA style uses in-text citations, in which each reference to the source is followed by parentheses containing the author's name and the date of the work.
Add the source to your bibliography. Again, the style you choose will determine the format of the bibliography entry. For an article in a book, for example, an MLA-style entry begins with the author's name, last name first. Next comes the title of the paper, in quotation marks, then the title of the book in italics. Each of these entries is separated by a period. Next comes "Ed." followed by the name of the editor, then another period, then the place of publication, a colon, and the name of the publisher and year of publication. The last part of the entry is the page range of the paper.