How to Quote An Article or Book: Academic Citations Explained

Learning how to quote an article is essential before submitting an essay, thesis, or academic assignment. When quoting an article, you take words from another person’s work, usually verbatim.

This is very different from paraphrasing or using someone else’s work as the basis of your research. When you quote an article, you need to directly attribute the work you’re quoting. You also need to make sure that the reader knows that the text is a direct quote and not any other type of reference.

You also need to be mindful that how to quote an article depends on the reference method and structure you’re using. For instance, APA, MLA, and Chicago referencing all have different requirements.

To help you, this article explains how to quote an article to ensure your academic assignment is correctly referenced and not flagged for plagiarism.

First: What are you quoting?

Before we get into the differences in how to quote an article based on different style guides, you need to be aware that the medium you’re quoting makes a big difference.

For example, the way you quote an article in a journal is different to how you should quote a book. Both of these are different from how to correctly quote a blog post or a YouTube video.

Therefore, we recommend having your style guide handy when quoting articles or books for academic papers so you get your references right.

Quoting an article or a book in academic texts: Three style options

When it comes to how to quote an article or book, there are three main style guides used in academic settings. These are MLA, APA, and Chicago. In this section, we reveal the key rules you need to follow and some examples from popular texts that you can use to guide you:

How to quote an article in the MLA style

The MLA style guide requires you to use parenthetical citations when referring to other people’s work. You’re required to include the words in quotation marks before including the author’s last name and the necessary page number. For example:

Quoting a book

“This was an all too typical South African story. It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity” (Mandela, 35).

At the end of the article, references to the quoted works should be published.

Citation for endnotes: Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Quoting a journal article

Quoting a journal article is different from quoting a book in your assignment. The MLA style requires you to include the author’s name, the title of the entry, and the name, date, and pages of the publication the article was released in.

Let’s look at an example to see how it looks in practice:

This wasn’t the case at all, as “the LRA stepped up its attacks on the civilian population, striking targets outside its usual zone of conflict” (Dunn, 139).

Citation for endnotes: Dunn, Kevin C. “Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army.” Review of African Political Economy, vol. 31, no. 100, 2004, pp. 139-142.

Note that some academic institutions require you to add the DOI (the website reference) when including a journal in your assignment, so check if this is also required before submitting your work.

How to quote an article in the APA style

The APA style guide is similar to the rules laid out in the MLA guide, but the presentation is different. As well as the author’s name and the relevant page number, you must include the year of the publication.

Though it’s easiest to include the quotation as a parenthetical citation, as is the case in MLA, it’s also possible to use the APA style for narrative citations.

Quoting a book

Here’s an example to show how you can use either method:

Parenthetical: Mandela learned that leadership was not about suppression. Rather, a more subtle approach was required, as “a leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind his flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind” (Mandela, 1994, p. 22).

Narrative: Mandela (1994) notes the subtlety of successful leadership, explaining that “a leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind his flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind” (p. 22).

Citation for endnotes: Mandela, N. (1994). Long Walk to Freedom. Little, Brown, and Company.

Quoting a journal article

As is the case with the MLA style, the APA style guide requires you to list more information when you’re quoting a journal article in your essay. This must include the same details in a slightly different format, as we illustrate below:

Their founding is shrouded in mystery, as “very little is actually known about the LRA, but numerous theories abound” (Dunn, 2004, p. 140).

Citation for endnotes: Dunn, K. C. (2004). Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army. Review of African Political Economy, 31(100), 139-142.

How to quote an article in the Chicago style

The Chicago style is notably different from the MLA and APA guides. It requires you to use footnotes at the bottom of the page rather than parenthetical or narrative citations within the text itself.

You don’t need to mention the author before or after the quotation marks in the text. But in the footnote, you should include the author’s name, the name of the publication, and the page.

Quoting a book

Here’s an example:

It loosened “the hold of the tribalism that still imprisoned me.” (1)

(1) Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 22.

Citation for endnotes: Mandela, Nelson. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom. Little, Brown, and Company.

Quoting a journal article

When quoting a journal article in the Chicago style, you need to generate a short note and a long note. You should use the long note the first time you quote the article. Then, for subsequent quotations, you can use the short note. You also need a full reference for the endnotes or bibliography.

Here’s how to quote an article in the Chicago format:

No resolution to the conflict looks to be on the horizon and “given the history of the struggle, it is likely that the underlying roots of the conflict will continue to keep both sides emboldened and embittered”(1)

Long note: Kevin C. Dunn, “Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army,” Review of African Political Economy, (2004): 142.

Short note: Dunn, “Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army,” 142.

Citation for endnotes: Dunn, Kevin C. “Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army.” Review of African Political Economy 31, no. 100 (2004): 139-142.

How to shorten or change quotations

The main reason for including a quotation in your work is to add credibility. But it also aims to retain the tone and voice of the original writer. Therefore, you shouldn’t try to change the quotation too much.

That said, it might be necessary to make slight adjustments to ensure the quotation makes sense in your assignment. You might also come across a quotation that you really like, only for it to have a long, irrelevant sentence in the middle. Removing this irrelevant sentence is possible, and it makes your work more concise.

The convention in assignments is to use an ellipsis (…) to indicate that some text has been removed from the original quotation.

It’s so important that you don’t misrepresent the author by removing some of the text from a quotation. Read the quote after shortening it to ensure that it still represents the point the author was trying to make.

Shortening quotes

Below is an example of how you might remove some text from a quotation using an ellipsis:

Full quotation: “They are like that. One must not hold it against them. Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people” (De Saint-Exupéry, 1945, p. 13).

Shortened quotation: “They are like that … children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people” (De Saint-Exupéry, 1945, p. 13).

Altering quotes

It might also be necessary to slightly alter a quote by adding or taking words out for it to make sense in your article.

Again, if you do this, you must be careful not to change the meaning of the quotation. It’s usually a necessary approach if you need to change the tense of the verb or add a pronoun.

If you wish to alter a quotation, you should use square brackets to indicate the words you have added. Here’s an example:

Original quotation: The Little Prince marvels at the lamplighters, saying, “Never would they make a mistake in the order of their entry upon the stage. It would be magnificent” (De Saint-Exupéry, 1945, p. 55).

Altered quotation: “Never would they [the lamplighters] make a mistake in the order of their entry up the stage. It would be magnificent” (De Saint-Exupéry, 1945, p. 55).

Using AI to generate accurate article quotations

Though you can use our examples above and refer to the published style guides, there’s another way to generate accurate article and book quotations.

When you sign up for Arvin AI, you can ask our tool to create an academic reference in your preferred style, be it MLA, APA, or Chicago.

This is undoubtledy the easiest way to ensure your references are on point, accurate, and error free. Check out the screenshots below to see how simple it is:

Step 1: Ask Arvin to create an MLA reference

Step 2: Provide the information requested by the tool

Step 3: Receive your reference and copy it to your assignment

Step 4: Ask Arvin to generate the reference in any other style guide that you require

Recap: How to quote an article or a book

You now have all the details you need to quote an article or a book in your academic assignment. The key thing to check before referencing is which style guide you need to use.

APA, MLA, and Chicago are the three most common style guide at colleges and universities. Though they’re similar, they have different ways of referencing quotations in academic work.

If you’re struggling with how to reference your work efficiently, be sure to check out Arvin AI and discover how our chat tool can generate citations in seconds. Use our screenshots above to guide you and bring your references together without hassle.

How to quote an article FAQ

How do you cite a quote from an article?

This depends on the style guide you’re following. The most common ways to cite a quote from an article are the APA, MLA, and Chicago style guides. You can use our examples above to guide you, or download the relevant style guide handbook to ensure you reference your article correctly.

How do I present a quote in an article?

You should always present a quote in an article in quotation marks. Then, depending on your style guide, you should include the author’s name and the page number from which the quotation was taken.

How do you quote an article title in an essay?

You need to quote an article title in the MLA, APA, or Chicago style. In most cases, you include the article title in the endnotes or bibliography at the end of the article, but in the Chicago style, you also need to include the title in the footnotes.