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Plagiarism and Citations

Two Types of Citations

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       image source (pixabay.com)

You may be familiar with the most common kind of citation -- the bibliography, works cited, or reference page citations. They appear at the end of your paper. These include all of the information about a source. They usually look something like this:

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York : Scribner, 2014, 2014. EBSCOhost, ezproxyrcc.helmlib.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat06662a&AN=rox.318114&site=eds-live.

We also use a kind of citation called "in-text citations," which appear in your essay. They help the reader understand where a certain piece of information comes from. They look something like this:

According to research on plagiarism and academic performance, grades change related to "the number of hours that students seek information and the number of academic videos they watch" (Torres-Diaz, Duart, & Hinojosa-Becerra, 2018, p. 98).

Bibliography Citations

You are probably familiar with creating a bibliography, works cited, or references page. This page, which comes at the end of your paper or project, lists the full citation for every source you got information from. 

These full citations usually include all of the information about an information source: the title, the author's name, the date of publication, the source of publication, and how you accessed it. The order and format of these details will depend on the style required by your professor (MLA, APA, Chicago) and the type of source you're citing. 

You can use online tools to create these citations, or consult the Purdue OWL's formatting and style guides to learn how to cite your sources. 

In-Text Citations

In-text citations are just what they sound like -- citations that appear in the text of your paper. Depending on which style you're using (APA, MLA, Chicago), the citation format may look different, but there are a few general guidelines to always follow. 

  • Use an in-text citation every time you use information from an outside source. 
  • Even if you paraphrase the information (put it "in your own words"), you must cite the source of the information with an in-text citation.
  • Make sure you have a full citation in your bibliography for every source that you cite in your paper using an in-text citation. 

In-text citations can seem confusing at first, but the Purdue OWL's formatting and style guides are an excellent resource for figuring them out!