How to use parenthetical documentation
While the Works Cited page indicates what sources you have used, parenthetical documentation in the body of your paper indicates what specific information you have borrowed from someone else’s work. This information includes quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and facts and ideas that are not common knowledge. If you do not document your use of borrowed material, you are committing plagiarism -- stealing the ideas of someone else and presenting them as your own.
Place the parenthetical documentation as close to the borrowed material as you can. If you are quoting, place the documentation at the end of the quotation, after the quotation mark but before the end punctuation. Each instance of documentation in the body of your paper must link directly to an entry on the Works Cited page.
Keep the parenthetical reference brief. Here are a few guidelines:
Most parenthetical references will consist of author and page: (Wharton 235)
If you refer to the author in a preceding sentence, you need only provide the page: (235)
If all of your references come from a single work (as when you write a paper for English), you need only provide the page number, provided that you mention the author and title at the beginning of the paper.
If the source has no author, provide a short version of the title:(“Cloning” 2)
If the source is from an encyclopedia or another similar source that relies on alphabetical order, no page number is necessary.
If you are documenting a Web page, page numbers are not usually necessary, since they will vary from printer to printer. Document the author or title. (Sometimes you have to look carefully to locate the author of a Web page, if there is an author at all.) Do not use the URL in the cite.
If you have two sources by the same author, include a brief version of the title in the parenthetical reference: (Ulrich, Midwife, 65)
If two authors have the same last name, identify them with their initial: (D. Kennedy 98)
Document a quotation from Shakespeare this way: (4.3. 65-68). That is, Act 4, Scene 3, lines 65-68.