Your professor will require that you use academic sources for any papers or projects that you complete while in college. And in order to prove that you are using academic sources and to allow your professor or reader to find the sources that you cite, you must provide a CITATION.
A Citation is like a roadmap to the source. It provides the author or authors, publication date, the title of the piece, and the source (such as publisher, Journal Title, etc .). It may also be required to provide either a DOI (document object identifier) or a URL.
Note:
The publication date is as specific as it needs to be in order for the person reading it to find the publication themselves.
