The anatomy of a citation consists of bibliographic elements, which are the specific pieces of information for things such as an author's name, a title, or who published a book or article. This is why your page of resources at the end of a paper is called a "Bibliography" (or it is sometimes called a "Works Cited," or "References" page, depending on your citation style).

Although your professor may want you to use a particular style of citation, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago, the bibliographic elements you need to create the citation are the same for each style.

Common Bibliographic Elements

These are common pieces of information that typically go into your bibliographic entry. We'll refer to your information source here as "the work," since these bibliographic elements are needed whether you're using a website, newspaper, scholarly article, book, or other source in your research.

Creator – Authors, editors, composers, photographers, or any person that has made some sort of creative contribution to the work.
Title – The FULL title of the work, including everything before and after a colon.
Publisher – The name of the organization, company, or group that published the work.
Place of Publication – The place where the work was originally published (typically the name of a city but sometimes a state, province, or country).
Year of Publication – The year the work was published.
Edition – Some works are published in different editions or versions, which can mean changes to information such as page numbers or year of publication.
Pagination – The specific page numbers of the work (if it was an article, chapter, or essay published in a larger work) and/or of the information you plan to directly quote or cite in your research (which is important to include so that others can easily track down your original source information).
DOI – The Digital Object Identifier, a string of numbers, letters and symbols used to permanently identify an article or document and link to it on the web.
URL – The web address for a specific online web page where the information source was found.