Citing+Your+Sources

PLAGIARISM and CITING YOUR SOURCES
According to Robert Harris, in "Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers," from his Virtual Salt blog, "Plagiarism is using another person's words or ideas without giving credit to the other person. When you use someone else's words, you must put quotation marks around them and give the writer or speaker credit by revealing the source in a citation. Even if you revise or paraphrase the words of someone else or just use their ideas, you still must give the author credit in a note. Not giving due credit to the creator of an idea or writing is very much like lying."

In order to avoid plagiarism, it is important that you give credit to your research sources whenever you directly quote or paraphrase the information. You do this by including in-text citations in your paper and by including a bibliography ("Works Cited") at the end of your paper that lists each research source used. For this paper, you are required to use MLA (Modern Language Association) style to format your paper and cite your sources. Another common citation format that you may encounter when writing academically is APA style.

MLA IN-TEXT (PARENTHETICAL) CITATION

When you refer in the text of your research paper to information that others have written, whether in reference books, magazine or journal articles, or websites, you must give credit to the source of that information in the context of your paper, whether you paraphrase or use a direct quote. For this paper, you will do this using in-text citation which means including your sources in parentheses (...) within the text of your paper. It is important that all sources that you use are also listed on your bibliography ("Works Cited" page) at the end of your paper (see next section).

Purdue's Online Writing Lab has an excellent page to help you use MLA In-Text Citations.

MLA WORKS CITED PAGE

Check out the Purdue University OWL: MLA Basics site for tips on preparing your Works Cited page.

Also check out this [|MLA Bibliographic Style Guide] from Joyce Kasman Valenza's //Power Tools Recharged.//

// **TIMESAVER ALERT!** It is important to have an understanding of the format for Works Cited page, but there are also many tools that can help you as long as you have the proper information to plug in. One popular FREE citation generator is Easybib.com. //


 * Additionally, most subscription databases have built-in citations available for resources and articles. Look for links such as "How to Cite", "Citation", "Bibliography," or "Source." **