There are many citation styles available to you for technical writing. While it has become the norm to just use the URL as a citation for real-world technical writing, academic citations are still important for your classes. The citation styles below are typically used within the field of engineering and technical writing. Please check your syllabus or ask your instructor to make sure you're using the right one for their assignment. If you're doing a group assignment, make sure everyone is on the same page of what citation style you're using.
Recommended citation styles:
- IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Style
- APA (American Psychological Association) Style
Hyperciting, Hyper-Referencing, and Hyperlinks
Some technical writing assignments will require you to include a hyper-citation or a hyper-reference for an article or ebook which includes an active hyperlink.
If you are citing public websites such as a government website you typically just need to copy and paste the URL into your citation list or embedded within your paper. If you copy the URL for a public website and share it out everyone would be viewing the same site.
However, this is not true for online library resources.
When using an article or book that you have accessed through the Mardigian Library you need to be aware that others outside the University of Michigan-Dearborn community may not be able to access the article you are referencing in the same way. You will need to consider your audience when creating hyper-citations for materials which are behind a paywall.
As a student, faculty, or staff member of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, you have access to materials which have been purchased or licensed by the library that others may not have or may need to access a different way.
- When creating a hypercitation for an audience outside the University you will need to use the "stable URL", "permalink", or the doi link (All of these different names used by different databases to provide stable, long-term access to one of their resources). This is not the URL in the address bar at the top of your browser page. It can usually be found in the header of the article or near the top or in a left hand menu (another trick I use sometimes is to save it in a citation management tool, like Zotero, and then look at the citation the tool creates for the resource. Sometimes the tool is better at locating the needed metadata than my eyes are.) Please keep in mind that for some people without a proper authentication, this will mean that they will not be able to read the full-text of the source you are linking to.
- When creating a hypercitaion for an audience within the University (your professor, or your classmates) you will need to use the "Off campus citation tool" that is provided by the Mardigian Library and can be found HERE. To use this tool you will still need the Permalink or doi as explained above, you will then need to paste that into the box and use the URL which the tool generates as the hyperlink for your citation. This attaches the necessary tags to route the user through our University servers allowing them to authenticate as UM community members and lets them see the items normally blocked by the paywall.
Find additional help with your writing visit UM-Dearborn's Writing Center.
