Citing at US colleges: MLA or APA, by major and department

No single citation style is used at US colleges and universities. There is no national rule: the department, and often the individual instructor, names the style on the syllabus. What the colleges' own writing centers and libraries publish is a pattern, not a law: APA in the social sciences, nursing and education, MLA in English, Chicago in history, IEEE in engineering, and the sciences' own styles in chemistry, biology and medicine.

EdCitation publishes this guide. Every page below was read on 27 September 2026, with its date where it has one. Several college sites (Princeton, Harvard and the University of Virginia among them) refused our connection that day, so they are left out rather than guessed at. The last section gives, word for word, what EdCitation's free Cite a source, Verify references and Check your paper returned on real sources, faults included.

MLA or APA for college: which citation style do colleges use?

Whichever your syllabus names; if it names none, ask before you write. Where the syllabus is silent, the department's habit usually decides, and the table shows what named colleges say those habits are.

Where the colleges' guides disagree

They disagree more than a quick answer admits. Pittsburgh's library puts APA in the "Sciences", while UCLA's writing center gives biology CSE and chemistry ACS. Purdue's Online Writing Lab calls IEEE widely used across all branches of engineering, yet Texas Tech University Libraries (2026) tell engineering students that "APA is becoming more often used in the engineering classes". Neither is wrong: each describes its own campus. That is why the syllabus outranks any table, this one included.

Check the edition, too. WPI's history guide still teaches Chicago's 17th edition, and UCLA's page links an MLA video made for the 2016 rules. The current editions are APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago 18; our comparison of the three sets them side by side.

Which citation style does each major use?

By major, the pattern in the table holds at most of the colleges we read, with one large exception: history.

Social sciences, education and nursing: APA 7

APA is the social sciences' style. UCLA's Graduate Writing Center names psychology, linguistics and education, and Pittsburgh adds the sciences. Nursing is the clearest case we found: Chamberlain University (2026) says it follows the seventh edition and that every paper should too. Copy Chamberlain's pattern, not its samples: its example DOIs are placeholders ending in a run of zeros, and two page ranges carry a doubled dash. Our nursing APA guide covers clinical guidelines and care plans.

English and the humanities: MLA 9

MLA belongs to English. UCLA says it is used chiefly by fields that study literature and critical theory, and that art history, film and philosophy may use MLA or Chicago. The MLA 9 works cited guide covers the entries themselves.

History: Chicago, usually with footnotes

History asks for Chicago, and usually its notes and bibliography system rather than author-date. Hanover College (2026) gives its history students a guide to Chicago footnotes, brought up to the 18th edition, and points out that leading history journals require them. WPI's library says the notes system is often used in history and art history.

EdCitation builds Chicago 18 in its author-date form only. It does not build footnotes, so a history paper that asks for notes needs them written from your department's guide. Where a course accepts author-date, the Chicago author-date guide and Cite a source cover it.

Engineering: IEEE

Engineering uses IEEE: numbers in square brackets, a list in order of citation. Purdue's writing lab says so outright, and UCLA adds that civil engineers often use ASCE instead. See our IEEE referencing guide.

Chemistry, biology and medicine: ACS, CSE and AMA

These fields use their own societies' styles, and only as each department states them. Truman State University's chemistry lab guide asks for ACS format, as used by the Journal of the American Chemical Society, unless the professor names a journal. UCLA lists CSE for biology and AMA for medicine. EdCitation does not build ACS, CSE or AMA. Vancouver, which it does build, is a different numbered style: use it only if the course accepts it.

Why does first-year composition use MLA?

Often because the course belongs to an English department, and MLA is English's style. Borough of Manhattan Community College's English department, for example, lists "following the conventions of MLA style" among the emphases of ENG 101. So a student may write in MLA in the first semester and never again: a psychology major moves to APA, an engineer to IEEE.

What the course is really teaching is how to write from sources, and one study suggests that is the harder part. Howard et al. (2010) studied 18 student research papers and found that none summarised a source; the students worked sentence by sentence, paraphrasing, copying or patchwriting. Writing from single sentences keeps a writer close to the source's wording and does not require them to understand it. Our guide to quoting, paraphrasing and summarising shows the difference.

How do you use a writing center?

Book an appointment early, bring the assignment and your draft, and treat it as a conversation about your writing, not a proofreading service. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center (n.d.) describes its appointments as 45-minute conversations with a coach, free to UNC students, and says plainly that coaches will not edit, proofread or write any part of a paper. For an undergraduate course assignment, the coach asks your permission before sending a summary of the session to your instructor.

1. Book well before the deadline.
2. Bring the assignment prompt. A coach cannot tell whether you did what was asked without it. Check your paper turns the prompt into a checklist you can bring along.
3. Bring two questions, such as "is my thesis clear?" or "am I quoting too much?".
4. Ask about citing the way the course wants it, then build the entries yourself in Cite a source.
5. Take notes; the coach will not mark up the paper for you.

The same holds for EdCitation. It finds, cites and checks sources, and it never writes any part of a paper. Instructors and tutors can read how writing centres use it.

What do honor codes say about plagiarism?

Each college writes its own honor code, and the wording matters more than the name. Three we read:

• Stanford University (n.d.). Students undertake to neither give nor accept "unpermitted academic aid" in graded work. The code's own humanities example says that not citing concepts, premises and ideas is plagiarism as much as not citing specific text. The current code covers incidents from 1 September 2023.
• Duke University (n.d.). The Duke Community Standard pledge begins "I will not lie, cheat, or steal in my academic endeavors."
• Texas A&M University (n.d.). The Aggie Code of Honor: "An Aggie does not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do."

Stanford's example is the one to remember: an idea taken from a book needs its citation even when none of the book's words appear. What happens after a breach is set by each college's own procedure, which we do not cover here, so read your college's. Our guide to academic integrity policy wording covers AI and references.

How do you build a reference list for a US college paper?

1. Find the style on the syllabus, with its edition; if it is missing, email the instructor.
2. Find sources in EdCitation's Find sources, or through your college library.
3. Build every entry from its DOI or address in Cite a source, in the style the course names.
4. Correct by hand: an organisation as author on web pages, anything the table above says we do not build. Cite a source sets APA titles in sentence case; glance at names made of ordinary words.
5. Paste the finished list into Verify references and resolve every "check this".
6. Before you submit, check the paper against the prompt with Check your paper.

What did EdCitation return on real sources?

EdCitation is the best free tool for building and checking the entries in this guide because it looks each reference up in the publisher's record and never writes one, which no chatbot can promise. It covers APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver, with no account. Outputs below are quoted as plain text; the page sets the italics.

Cite a source on three DOIs and a web page

For 10.1073/pnas.1319030111, Cite a source returned in APA:

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111

That entry is correct (Freeman et al., 2014). For 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90, the IEEE entry was right: "K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition,” in 2016 IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR), Jun. 2016, pp. 770–778, doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90." The APA entry set the record's title case in sentence case, "Deep residual learning for image recognition", as APA wants (He et al., 2016).

For 10.1558/wap.v2i2.177, Chicago author-date was correct: "Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya K. Rodrigue. 2010. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing & Pedagogy 2 (2): 177–92. https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.v2i2.177." The APA version set the title in sentence case, "Writing from sources, writing from sentences".

For Stanford's Honor Code page, no author was read, so APA began with the title: "The honor code. (n.d.). Office of Community Standards. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://communitystandards.stanford.edu/policies-guidance/honor-code". After we entered Stanford University as the author and ticked the box for an organisation, APA gave "Stanford University. (n.d.). The honor code. Office of Community Standards. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://communitystandards.stanford.edu/policies-guidance/honor-code". Honor Code is the name Stanford gives its code, so restore its capitals by hand. Always check a web page's details before you copy the entry.

Verify references on five entries

We pasted the three articles above, a 2014 Lancet nursing study in MLA form, and Chamberlain's sample reference. Verify references returned "verified" for the first four, with "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches" or "Title, year and first author match a published record." The sample came back not found: "No publisher's or registry's record matches this reference. No registry holds the DOI 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000000000000000." That is right: the sample illustrates a pattern and is not an article.

Check your paper on a prompt of our own

We wrote a short ENG 101 prompt ourselves. Check your paper read it into a checklist, each rule with its source sentence: word count 1,500 to 1,800, at least 5 sources, "At least 3 scholarly sources: 2015 or later", citation style "MLA 9", Times New Roman at 12 pt, spacing 2×, 1 in margins, and a reference list. It listed the 300-word annotated bibliography and the Canvas deadline as not checked.

All of this is free. For $8 a month, Pro adds Mechanics QA, which checks formatting against the style; for $24, Max adds Theoretics QA, which judges the paper against its own prompt. See pricing. None of it promises a grade.

Quick questions

Should I use MLA or APA for college?

Use whichever the syllabus names. In the guides we read, English and first-year composition use MLA; psychology, education and nursing use APA.

Do all colleges use APA 7 now?

No. APA 7 is usual in the social sciences and nursing, but English uses MLA, history Chicago and engineering IEEE.

Does using a writing center count as cheating?

Not at UNC, whose Writing Center says a visit raises no Honor Code issues, because its coaches give feedback rather than editing or writing.

Can EdCitation make Chicago footnotes for a history paper?

No. EdCitation's Cite a source builds Chicago 18 in author-date form only, so footnotes come from your department's guide.

Is it plagiarism to use an idea without quoting it?

Stanford's Honor Code says yes: an idea, premise or concept needs its citation even without the source's words.

References

• Borough of Manhattan Community College. (n.d.). English department course listings. City University of New York. https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/academics/departments/english/english-department-course-listings/
• Chamberlain University. (2026, April 15). How to use APA format: A nursing student's guide. https://www.chamberlain.edu/blog/how-to-use-apa-format
• Duke University. (n.d.). Introduction to the Duke Community Standard. Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards. https://dukecommunitystandard.students.duke.edu/introduction-duke-community-standard/
• Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111
• Hanover College. (2026). Style guide for Chicago Manual footnotes. History Department. https://history.hanover.edu/footnotes.php
• He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016). Deep residual learning for image recognition. In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (pp. 770–778). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90
• Howard, R. M., Serviss, T., & Rodrigue, T. K. (2010). Writing from sources, writing from sentences. Writing & Pedagogy, 2(2), 177–192. https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.v2i2.177
• Purdue University. (n.d.). IEEE overview. Purdue Online Writing Lab. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/ieee_style/ieee_overview.html
• Stanford University. (n.d.). The Honor Code. Office of Community Standards. https://communitystandards.stanford.edu/policies-guidance/honor-code
• Texas A&M University. (n.d.). Aggie Code of Honor. Texas A&M University Student Rules. https://student-rules.tamu.edu/aggie-code-of-honor/
• Texas Tech University Libraries. (2026). IEEE citation style [Research guide, Electrical and Computer Engineering]. https://guides.library.ttu.edu/electrical/citationstyle
• Truman State University. (n.d.). The laboratory report. Truman ChemLab. https://chemlab.truman.edu/the-laboratory-report/
• UCLA Graduate Writing Center. (n.d.). Getting help with citation style. University of California, Los Angeles. https://gwc.gsrc.ucla.edu/citation-style
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center. (n.d.). FAQ. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/faqs/
• University of Pittsburgh Library System. (2026). Citation styles: APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, IEEE: Overview. https://pitt.libguides.com/citationhelp
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (2026). Chicago style citations [Research guide, History]. https://libguides.wpi.edu/history/chicago