Citing Sources

There are two important reasons for documenting your research project or papers with complete and accurate references or bibliographic citations:

• To find the information cited again if you or others need it or in order to pursue additional research
• To give proper credit to the originator when using their work or ideas to avoid plagiarism, a failing grade, or a lawsuit

When Do You Cite

You should include a citation for resources if you are representing someone else's words, charts, graphs, or ideas. If you do not give credit to the original source, you are committing plagiarism.

Plagiarism is a very serious offense. According to the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of plagiarize is "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own without crediting the source." In addition, it is important to give proper credit to authors if you paraphrase their work. Paraphrasing is "a restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form." Most college faculty have access to Web databases that can easily help them find and verify information that they may suspect as being plagiarized.

To avoid plagiarism, try one of these three approaches to using outside sources:

• Quoting To quote a source correctly, copy the passage word for word, place those words in quotation marks, and cite the source you found the quote in. If you are quoting lengthy passages (ie. a whole paragraph), use block indentation and a citation.
  
• Paraphrasing To paraphrase, restate the information from a source using your own words. A paraphrased passage will be about the same length as the original passage. One way to paraphrase a passage is to use an attributive tag, such as "According to Thomas Jefferson,...".
  
• Summarizing A summarized passage includes only the main ideas of a source in your own words, leaving out specific details. Summaries are typically shorter than paraphrased passages, and still must be cited.
  

If you have any question about whether to cite or not cite, you probably should cite the source.

How Do You Cite

The two most popular citation styles are APA and MLA. However, there are many other styles. If you need assistance with APA or MLA, the UVSC Library has links to several helps.

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