How to Cite a Figure or Table Reproduced from Another Source

Quick Answer: cite a reproduced figure or table

Number and title the object as your style requires, then credit the source next to it. APA 7 puts the credit in the figure or table note, beginning From (unchanged) or Adapted from (changed), and still lists the source in the reference list. MLA 9 puts the source in the caption under a figure (Fig. 1.) or in a Source: line under a table, and needs a works-cited entry only if the caption is incomplete or you also cite the work in the text. Chicago 18 ends the caption with a credit line (Reproduced by permission of…, Courtesy of…, Public domain) or a Source: line under a table, and cites the work in a note and the bibliography only when you also use it in the text. None of the three styles puts a parenthetical citation under the picture in place of the credit.

Reprinted, adapted, or built from someone's data?

The wording of the credit depends on what you did to the object, so settle that first. All three styles distinguish an exact copy from a modified copy, and all three treat a new table or chart you drew from another author's numbers as your table with a citation, not as a reproduction.

• Reprinted (reproduced): you copied the figure or table without changing content. The image file, the scan, or the same rows and columns retyped verbatim all count. APA writes From; Chicago writes Reproduced from or Reprinted from; MLA simply cites the source in the caption.
• Adapted: you cropped, recolored, translated labels, dropped a column, merged two panels, or redrew the chart from the same values. APA writes Adapted from; Chicago writes Adapted from; MLA still cites the source and may say adapted from in the caption text.
• Built from the data: you took numbers out of the source's text or tables and made your own table or graph. That is your own object. Cite the data with an ordinary citation in the note or caption (Data from…), and no permission is needed for the facts themselves.

APA 7: figure number, title, image, and a copyright attribution in the note

APA 7 gives figures and tables the same stack: a bold number (Figure 1), an italic title in title case on the next line, the object itself, then an italic Note. below it. The figure setup and table setup pages show the layout. When the object is reprinted or adapted, the Publication Manual (§7.7 for tables and figures, §12.15 and §12.18 for permissions) requires a copyright attribution in that general note and a reference list entry for the source. The attribution replaces the in-text citation for the figure: do not add (Brennan & Suzuki, 2019) under the picture as well.

**Figure 1**
*Mean Recall Score by Hours of Sleep*
[image]
*Note.* From "Sleep Duration and Recall in Undergraduates," by T. Brennan and H. Suzuki, 2019, *Journal of Cognitive Education*, *34*(2), p. 121 (https://doi.org/10.5555/jce.2019.0342). Copyright 2019 by the Society for Cognitive Education. Reprinted with permission.

The attribution uses the same facts as the reference entry in a different order: title first, then by and the authors with initials before surnames, the year, the source, the page, and the DOI or URL in parentheses. Article titles take quotation marks and title case here, even though the reference list gives them in sentence case without quotation marks. Book and periodical titles are italic. The sentence about permission is literal: write Reprinted with permission or Adapted with permission only if you obtained it, and write In the public domain or the Creative Commons licence name when that is the legal basis instead.

Figure reprinted from a journal article

Table adapted from a book

A table note follows the same rule as a figure note. If you dropped rows, changed the units, or reordered the columns, the credit begins Adapted from. The page reference sits in parentheses after the book title together with the edition, which is where APA puts both.

**Table 2**
*Heat-Related Emergency Visits per 100,000 Residents, 2015–2020*
[table]
*Note.* Adapted from *Urban Heat and Public Health* (2nd ed., p. 88), by L. M. Okafor, 2021, Routledge. Copyright 2021 by Taylor & Francis. Adapted with permission.

Public domain and Creative Commons

Works of the U.S. federal government are in the public domain, so a chart from a federal agency page ends In the public domain. and needs no permission sentence. A Creative Commons figure ends with the licence's short name, exactly as the APA clip art and stock image examples do. The source still goes in the reference list in both cases.

Your own figure from someone else's data

If you drew a new bar chart from values printed in Brennan and Suzuki's results section, the chart is yours. There is nothing to reprint, so there is no copyright attribution and no From. Credit the numbers with a normal in-text citation inside the note, and keep the reference-list entry.

**Figure 2**
*Recall Scores Across Four Sleep Groups*
[your chart]
*Note.* Data are from Brennan and Suzuki (2019, Table 2). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

MLA 9: a caption under the figure, a source line under the table

MLA 9 (§1.7 of the MLA Handbook) labels illustrations Fig. with an arabic numeral and puts the caption directly below the image. Tables are different: the label Table 1 and the title go on separate lines above the table, and the source and any lettered notes go below it. The Style Center caption post and the formatting PDF show both. The handbook's own caption sample, Fig. 1. Mary Cassatt, *Mother and Child*, Wichita Art Museum., sets the pattern: the creator's name in normal order, the elements in works-cited order, separated by commas, ending with a period.

The handbook's rule on the works-cited list is narrow: if the caption gives complete information about the source and you do not cite that source anywhere in the text, no works-cited entry is required. In practice most papers also quote or paraphrase the article, so the entry ends up in the list anyway. If your instructor wants every source listed, add it; a duplicate is never wrong, a missing entry is. When the reproduced figure is an artwork or photograph rather than a chart, the caption follows the image pattern in How to Cite a Painting, Photograph, or Artwork in MLA.

Tables in MLA

Table 1
Heat-Related Emergency Visits per 100,000 Residents, 2015-2020
[table]
Source: Lena M. Okafor, *Urban Heat and Public Health*, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2021, p. 88.
a. Visits are counted by discharge diagnosis, not by chief complaint.

Referring to figures and tables in the text

In running prose MLA lowercases the label: fig. 1, table 2. Put the pointer in parentheses or in the sentence, and keep the page reference to the original in the caption rather than repeating the source in the parenthetical. An in-text citation of the article itself still uses author and page: (Brennan and Suzuki 121).

Chicago 18: captions, credit lines, and source notes

Chicago handles reproduction in chapter 3 of the manual (illustrations and tables), not in the citation chapters. A figure gets a caption that begins Figure 1. (or Fig. 1. if your publisher prefers), and the credit line normally comes at the end of the caption, either after Source: or in parentheses. A table gets its number and title above, then a source note below introduced by Source: (italic in the manual's examples, roman on most student templates), then general notes and lettered notes. Chicago's standard credit-line vocabulary is Reproduced by permission of, Courtesy of, Photograph by, Adapted from, and Data from. In CMOS 17 the credit-line paragraphs were §3.29–3.37; CMOS 18 keeps the same rules and drops the requirement to name a place of publication for post-1900 books, matching the Notes and Bibliography citation guide.

A source that appears only in a credit line does not have to be in the bibliography. Add it when the work is also cited in the text, or when your department wants every source you drew on listed — Turabian-based student templates usually do. Number figures and tables in separate sequences, and refer to them in prose in lowercase: see figure 1, as table 2 shows. The Chicago footnote generator builds the note; the credit line is a sentence you write.

Tables: the Source: line

Table 1. Heat-related emergency visits per 100,000 residents, 2015–2020
[table]
*Source:* Data from Lena M. Okafor, *Urban Heat and Public Health*, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2021), 88, table 4.2.
*Note:* Visits are counted by discharge diagnosis.
a Provisional figure.

Public domain, Creative Commons, and courtesy lines in Chicago

Chicago prefers the shortest true statement of the legal basis. Material obtained free of charge or in the public domain is credited to its source without a permission phrase; a lender who supplied the image gets Courtesy of. A Creative Commons licence is named at the end of the credit.

Chicago author-date

Credit lines do not change between the two Chicago systems; only the citation of the source in the text does. In author-date, the caption or source note may use a short parenthetical, and the full entry lives in the reference list with the year after the authors. See the Author-Date citation guide.

Copyright, fair use, and the permission line

A correct credit line is not a licence. Citation answers who made this; copyright answers may I copy it. For most coursework the answer is yes: reproducing one figure in a paper that is read by an instructor and never distributed is a textbook case of fair use under section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act (educational, non-commercial, a small portion, no effect on the market), and comparable teaching exceptions exist in the UK, EU, Canada, and Australia. The moment the paper is published — a journal article, a book chapter, a thesis deposited in an open repository, a conference poster, a public website — fair use becomes a judgment call and publishers usually require written permission for any figure or table that is not public domain or openly licensed. The plagiarism guide covers the separate academic-integrity question: an uncredited reproduction is plagiarism regardless of copyright status.

• CC BY — reuse and adapt with credit. Name the licence in the credit line.
• CC BY-SA — as CC BY, and your adaptation must carry the same licence; unusual in a paper but relevant to a website.
• CC BY-NC — no commercial reuse. A course paper is fine; a textbook is not.
• CC BY-ND — no adaptations. You may reprint the figure unchanged but may not crop, recolor, or redraw it.
• CC0 / public domain dedication — no credit legally required, but every citation style still requires one academically.

Quick comparison

Common mistakes

• Putting (Author, Year) under the figure instead of a credit line. All three styles use the note, caption, or credit line for a reproduced object.
• Writing From in APA when you changed the figure. Any modification, including cropping and relabeling, makes it Adapted from.
• Claiming Reprinted with permission in a class paper when no permission was requested. Either drop the sentence or state the real basis (In the public domain, CC BY 4.0).
• Forgetting the reference-list entry in APA. The copyright attribution never replaces it.
• Using an APA-style caption below the figure in an APA paper. Since the seventh edition the number and title go above; only the note goes below.
• Inverting the author's name in an MLA caption or a Chicago credit line. Those are running text, so Tomás Brennan, not Brennan, Tomás.
• Putting an MLA table's title below the table. Tables take the label and title above; only illustrations take a caption below.
• Citing a figure you redrew from published numbers as a reproduction. It is your figure with Data from, and it needs no permission.
• Treating an old painting's museum photograph as public domain without checking. The painting may be; the museum's photograph may carry its own terms.
• Reprinting a CC BY-ND figure with your own annotations. ND forbids adaptation.

Related guides and official manuals

• How to Cite an Image or Artwork in APA 7
• How to Cite a Painting, Photograph, or Artwork in MLA
• How to Present Data in Tables and Figures
• How to Avoid Plagiarism
• How to Cite a Dataset in APA
• How to cite an image in APA: worked examples
• APA Style: tables and figures
• APA Style: figure setup
• APA Style: table setup
• APA Style: clip art or stock image references (Creative Commons notes)
• MLA Style Center: formatting figure captions
• MLA Style Center: images reproduced in books
• Chicago Manual of Style: citation quick guide
• Chicago Notes-Bibliography citation guide
• Chicago Author-Date citation guide