Research Resource: Citing Your Work
Overview
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
Get help writing your citations! There are a few resources here that will essentially format your citations for you if you just plug in the appropriate information (Be sure to use MLA Citation Style for this course). Try these:
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.
Another resource you may want to check out is Citation Machine. By filling in the relevant information it will generate a formatted citation for you. Another one you may want to try is EasyBib. It very likely will have some errors, but those will be easy for you to edit if you look at the examples. Anything to save time on this part of your assignments is worth it.
Additional Citation Info:
Sometimes you'll find a number of ways to cite something online. In many cases you'll be accessing content that was first produced somewhere else, like a television show. Depending on your purpose, there are various ways to cite this type of material. If you found it via another source you'll always want to include that at the end of your citation by saying Retrieved from and then the date you accessed it. For example:
In this case it was an episode of The Office viewed on Hulu. You can find all of the information you need to cite television programs and films at the Internet Movie Database.
Another new resource you may wish to cite is a tweet you wish to reference from Twitter; here's how:
Name (username). "Tweet text". Time. Tweet.
example:
Fila, Jon (MoodleShare). "When someone says she hopes the pizza doesn't get here too soon, it's time for me to leave that meeting and go find lunch." 19 Feb. 2013, 7:54 p.m. Tweet.
Click here for more tweet citing detail.
Feel free to bring any of your questions on this issue to the Help Forum where the teacher and students are standing by to assist you.