Welcome to Murphy Library’s tutorial to help you learn more about citing sources.
After completing this module you should be able to:
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes.
Citations can feel like tedious busywork as you carefully place commas, colons, and periods to appease your instructor. But citation does actually serve several useful purposes.
To Show Authority
Effective delivery of information leans heavily on credibility. Your audience will find you more believable when you offer solid evidence to back your claims.
Providing a citation for your audience or readers enables them to look up the information on their own and verify its accuracy.
To Show Academic Integrity & Avoid Plagiarism
Read through the information in the Plagiarism Policy (Links to an external site.) box in the linked library guide. Click on Chapter 14 of the UW System Code and find the list of potential disciplinary sanctions associated with academic misconduct.
Scholarly Communication
Citing your sources provides a road map that allows your instructors and peers to verify the evidence you use to back up your statements.
Through the practice of scholars citing one another, a field of research builds over time with discoveries and new understandings paving the way for future research.
Q: "Do I have to learn all of the citation styles?
A: Once you learn the key components that all citation styles share, it's easy to learn the different styles like APA and MLA.
Common elements to all citation styles are:
Q: "Why are there so many citation styles?"
A: Each academic discipline has developed its own citation style based on what is most important in that discipline.
For example, an APA-style citation in a study on vaccines lists the date near the beginning to emphasize when the data was collected. The currency of information is particularly important in the physical and social sciences.
Citation styles, like MLA, Chicago, and APA, were developed to meet the research needs of a specific discipline.
Click on the link to view to the Why We Cite (Links to an external site.) library guide.
Each citation style (such as MLA or APA) uses different rules for formatting.
There are three ways to let your audience know about the sources you have used:
In-text citations "point" readers to the full bibliographic entry at the end of the document.
You need to include an in-text reference whether you quote the material directly from the source, paraphrase it, or refer to an idea.
Each citation style has its own parenthetical citation guidelines.
In-text citation is for written work only.
During a speech, you need to use an oral citation (Links to an external site.) for any information you take from a source, not just for direct quotes.
If you do not cite a source orally, it is plagiarism.
It is important to consider your audience at every point in a speech, which includes orally citing sources.
For example, unless the author is widely known using their name in your citation won't be meaningful to your audience. Instead, you should give context to show the value of the author and their work.
Academic work is not complete without a bibliographic reference page. The reference page provides all the information needed to find every source that you use in the body of your speech/research project.
Use the sample APA References (Links to an external site.) page as a tool to help you build accurate citation.
Need more help?
The Online Writing Lab (OWL) (Links to an external site.) at Purdue is a free, online, and credible source of citation help.
Want to use a citation manager to get that first draft done? We can help you choose one here (Links to an external site.).
Every citation style publishes a physical manual and we have copies of them in the library. Check out the ones we have here (Links to an external site.).