Citing Business Information: Home

Writing a presentation or report usually requires information from many sources (for example, a company's 10-K, market research reports, newspaper articles).

To maintain your professional and academic reputation, you must cite every source.

This guide provides examples of how to cite many different business information sources in APA format.

• Articles: cite scholarly, popular, trade, and newspaper articles.
• Reports: cite industry reports from IBISWorld, market research reports from Mintel, and others.
• Information from Business Databases: cite dynamically-created business information from sources such as Mergent Online and ReferenceUSA.
• Websites: cite blogs, company websites.
• Government sources: cite Census data, BLS statistics, etc.
• Books: cite books and ebooks

In the academic setting, we use formalized styles of attribution. Formatting your citations in a format like APA is just a standardized means of giving credit to the person or company who created the content you use. The content creator may be an author, blogger, photographer, or your professor, for example. Outside of academia, you'll probably cite your work in different ways. For a list of great examples, see Corey Eridon's blog post How to Cite Sources & Not Steal People's Content on the Internet.

There are many, many different citation styles to choose from. Depending on your discipline, target audience, or place of work (even Buzzfeed has its own style), you will be asked to use different styles in different situations. In addition to prescribing how to cite sources, these styles also dictate standard formats for many aspects of writing (for example, organizing the content of your paper, whether to use footnotes, and even grammar rules).