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Steps in the Research Process: 6. Cite Your Sources

Research Tips

  • To save yourself time and trouble, create citations for your sources as you find them. 
  • If you wait until the end to cite your sources, you are likely to forget which ones you used.

Why Is Citing Important?

Citing sources used in your research process is important for three reasons:

  1. It gives recognition to the authors of your sources and helps you avoid plagiarism. Knowingly representing the work of others as your own is plagiarism. (See our Plagiarism research guide for more information.)
  2. It allows others to find the sources you used in your research.
  3. It lends credibility to your essay.

Handouts summarizing the APA and MLA styles are available in the reference room. Find links to online style guides on this page.

Tic Tac Toe

If you feel like you need some practice with citations, try this Tic-Tac-Toe citation game from James Madison University. 

What Do I Cite?

  1. Any source that you use, not just books and journal articles
  2. Direct quotes of two or more words
  3. Anything you paraphrase or summarize
  4. Information which may be basic knowledge but could be unfamiliar to your reader

If you are unsure whether or not to cite something, cite it. It is better to cite something you don't have to than to not cite something you should. 

*Below are some resources to help you with citations.*

Purdue's Online Writing Lab Resources:

  • In-text Citations
  • Works Cited Page/Reference List

Citing Social Media

            

You can now cite tweets and Facebook posts! Follow the links below for the APA and MLA formats. 

How to Avoid Plagiarism

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use

  • Another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
  • Any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge;
  • Quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
  • Paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.

There are three ways of incorporating other writers’ work into your own writing.

Quotation: using someone's words. When you quote, place the passage you are using in quotation marks, and document the source according to a standard documentation style.

Paraphrase: using someone's ideas, but putting them in your own words. Although you use your own words to paraphrase, you must still acknowledge the source of the information.

Summary: should be shorter than the original passage.  The summary should keep the author's original message in mind.  Make sure your summary does not change the intent of the piece.