How Would You Cite a Book If There are Authors Within the Text?

When writing a college paper that draws upon references from a book, there are style and formatting guides to help you create citations that properly credit the quotes and information you take from the book to the original source. For a book that contains multiple works from different authors inside -- a short story collection or a poetry anthology, for example -- there are special rules for citing the collection as a whole or individual works within its pages.

Instructions

    • 1

      Determine whether you are citing the whole work or just one of the stories, poems, essays or reference materials inside. Citing the book as a whole, as in the case of using more than one or two pieces from the collection or drawing material from the introduction or text that is not part of an individual work, is covered by different rules than those that apply to citing one or two individual stories from an anthology.

    • 2

      To cite an entire book -- a collection of poems, a short story anthology, English textbook or reference book, for example -- start your citation by listing the editor or editors first, the name of the book, the place of publication, the publishing company, year of publication and medium of publication ("Print" in the case of a book). The Purdue OWL website lists the following citation as a reference: "Hill, Charles A., and Marguerite Helmers, eds. Defining Visual Rhetorics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Print."

    • 3

      To cite an individual story, poem, essay or other work from within a collection, anthology, reference book or English textbook, list the name of the author followed by the title of the work, title of the book (collection, anthology, etc.), the edition number, editor's name or names, place it was published, name of the publisher, date of publication, the pages on which the work can be found and the medium of publication (again, for a book, use "Print"). Purdue's OWL website lists the following example citation in MLA style: "Harris, Muriel. "Talk to Me: Engaging Reluctant Writers." A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One. Ed. Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000. 24-34. Print."

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