Section Four B - Evaluate & Cite - Citing Your Sources - Citing Your Sources

The sure way to practice academic honesty, avoid plagiarism, and use information ethically and legally is to cite or acknowledge where you found your information sources. This is referred to as citing your sources.

When writing a paper, citations are the acknowledgement that you have taken information from another source. The citation should lead readers to the exact location where the information being cited can be found. Depending on the style of writing required by your professor, these citations usually take the form of footnotes or a bibliography. Footnotes are usually at the bottom of the page, while a bibliography is usually on the last pages of a written paper. These bibliographies are referred to as References or Works Cited, depending on the writing format or style.

Why Should You Cite?

• By citing your information sources you support the credibility of your own research.
• Documenting your sources serves as evidence and proof on the authority of any statements, ideas, or concepts that you make in your writing.
• Your citations lead an interested reader to the same information you found and the opportunity to find more information about your topic.
• You can avoid plagiarism by citing all the information you use.

The following Cite a Source: How and Why You Should Do It video (2:24 min) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, illustrates how and why you should cite your sources and use in-text and reference citations in your papers, and introduces several citation styles.

When to Give Credit

Although it's a good idea to cite all your information sources, there are situations that don't need documentation or citing:

• Writing your own experiences, your own observations and insights, your own thoughts, and your own conclusions about a subject.
• When you are writing results that you obtained through your own lab or field experiments.
• When you use your own artwork, digital photographs, video, audio, etc.
• When you are using generally-accepted facts, e.g., pollution is bad for the environment, including facts that are accepted within particular discourse communities, e.g., in the field of composition studies, "writing is a process" is a generally-accepted fact.
• When you are using common knowledge, things like folklore, common sense observations, myths, urban legends, and historical events (but not historical documents). Common knowledge is considered a well-established fact that can be found in several information sources.
  • Example: John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States in 1960.
  • Example: Jane Austen was born in 1775.

Basic Citation Information

Various citation formats are used in college classes, but they all require similar information about an information source. The various styles differ primarily in how the elements of an information source (author, title, publisher) are arranged in a citation. The most commonly used writing styles that you may at SUU are APA (American Psychological Association), and MLA (Modern Language Association). Basic information for all writing formats usually includes author, title of article, title of publication, publisher, and place of publication.

Style Manuals

Specific details on how to cite materials properly are available in style manuals. Different style manuals are used for different subjects.  The format used for LM1010 is the MLA style. This is probably the most common format used in college writing, since it is used for most arts and humanities classes, especially English classes.

MLA handbook written and published by the Modern Language Association of America

Call number:  LB2369.G53 2016 Main Collection 2nd floor

The library keeps style manuals for many other college subjects (APA, Chicago, etc.). Copies of many style manuals are available on Reserve at the Circulation Desk.

Be sure to ask your instructor what citation style is required for your assignment. A librarian can assist you in finding an appropriate style manual.