What follows is a quick example consisting of two paragraphs and an accompanying reference list. For additional details on citing sources and for links to specific style guides (such as APA or MLA), see the "documentation" section of the Center for Writing's Quicktips. Here's the quick example:

Health care costs constitute approximately one-fourth of all benefit costs, and both overall benefit costs and health care costs continue to grow as a proportion of overall compensation (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004). Faced with an ever-increasing health care cost burden, employers have responded with a variety of efforts to cut or at least curtail costs. Perhaps the most common strategy adopted by employers has been to shift costs by requiring employees to bear a higher financial responsibility for health care in the form of premium contributions, co-pays, and deductibles (Lee and Tolen, 2002). As Madrian (2001) notes, since health care costs generally are fixed per employee, firms can also reduce compensation outlays by hiring fewer employees at longer work hours. Ironically, companies face these significant benefits costs because starting in the 1950s, corporations insisted on company-provided rather than publicly-provided benefits in order to "tip the balance of state power away from workers and toward business" (Klein, 2003, p. 2). {Note the page number which is required to document direct quotations}

Health care insurance affects the employment relationship in other ways. Gruber and Madrian (2002) find that employees with health insurance coverage through a current job are less likely to accept a new job or to retire prior to age 65 if the change in job status is accompanied by a loss of health insurance coverage. Rising health care costs also have become a contentious issue in labor/management relations. All too often, these labor/management disputes focus on how to split the burden of escalating costs, rather than on how to share the bounty of increasing profits (Ceniceros, 2003). While proposal for national health insurance are attacked as creating an inefficient system, Klein (2003, p. 14) shows that "private benefits were political, inefficient, inflationary, and unreliable from their inception."

References

Bureau of Labor Statistics (2005) "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation - March 2005" (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor), http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ect/home.htm [accessed August 4, 2005]. {Note the inclusion of the date that you access a cited web page}

Ceniceros, Roberto (2003) "Unions Fight Cost-Shifting," Business Insurance 37 (October 2003), pp. 1-2.

Gruber, Jonathan and Brigitte Madrian (2004) "Health Insurance, Labor Supply, and Job Mobility: A Critical Review of the Literature," in Catherine G. McLaughlin, ed., Health Policy and the Uninsured (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press), pp. 97-178.

Klein, Jennifer (2003) For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Lee, Jason S. and Laura Tollen (2002) "How Low Can You Go? The Impact of Reduced Benefits and Increased Cost Sharing," Health Affairs - Web Exclusive (June 19), http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w2.229v1/DC1 [accessed April 11, 2005].

Madrian, Brigitte (2001) "Health Insurance and the Labor Market," in Huizhong Zhou, ed., The Political Economy of Health Care Reform (Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research), pp. 87-108.

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