Research Resource: Citing Your Work
There are multiple ways of citing information in your papers. Do you need in-text citations? Footnotes? Is your paper supposed to be in MLA or format? Do you need an Annotated Bibliography?
If you are practicing in-text citations, remember, even paraphrased information should be cited.
MLA In-Text Citations
Citing Electronic Information- from the Internet Public Library.
Citing Sources to help you avoid plagiarism
Typically, you'll want to use Primary Sources whenever possible (this means that the information you're looking at was released in that document). Sometimes you'll find information that someone else is citing in their paper and you'll want to use it. That is called a Secondary Source and is generally not considered to be quite as good. Should you decide however that you still want to use it please note the difference in how those citations look.
These sites will help you get started, but they often do not format things quite correctly. Use them to get your info. down, but make sure you double-check the citation to make it correct or you may find yourself losing some credit:
Writing an Annotated Bibliography
More Detail
In order to avoid plagiarism, it is important to give credit where it is due for all of the information you find. This is especially important in any online setting where you may be creating content that the public can access.
Any original idea belongs to someone. It's through his/her effort and research that new knowledge and connections are made. When using that person's work, it is only fair that it is cited and proper credit is given. If you do not provide the proper citation giving credit to a work then it appears that you are stealing their content or ideas, in other words, plagiarizing.
There are two popular ways to do this: Modern Language Association (MLA) Style (Most commonly used in high schools and colleges in Humanities courses) & American Psychological Association (APA) Style (most commonly used in the Social Sciences). In this class, we'll be focusing on MLA Style. If you would like information on APA Style citations visit this page.
Purdue University has put together some amazing resources for researching, writing and citing called the Online Writing Lab (OWL) it's worth checking out for any kind of writing you need to do. We'll be looking at these resources to prepare you for your assignments.
There are three methods of citation that you'll need to concern yourself with:
- Formatting Quotations
If you quote directly or paraphrase (put into your own words) you still have to cite. (This is another one of those things that teachers in the past may have told you, "You can use it, but you have to put it in your own words." This is inaccurate. You can use pretty much anything, if it's a direct quote or a paraphrase. Either way, it needs a citation and you have to refer to it in your works cited page. This resource will also tell you when you don't need to cite. - In-Text Citation
How your sentence is written, will determine how this should look. Check out the link for In-Text Citation to see plenty of examples and an explanation for why. - Works Cited page
This is the big one that will be under the most scrutiny. Check out the example on the left of the link to view other examples relating to your specific resource. It's frustrating, it takes a lot of time and it's really not as bad as it seems. Find an example that looks like the resource you're citing and substitute that information with your own. Pretty soon, you won't even need to look any more.