Citing Your Sources

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Citing Your Sources

Academic Integrity

Acknowledging or citing other people's words and ideas indicates that you have conducted thorough background research on your topic and are operating from an informed perspective, increasing your credibility. Other people's ideas can also be used to reinforce your arguments, or as points to argue against. Finally, ideas are intellectual property and there are serious repercussions for failing to follow citing conventions.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is representing the work of others as your own. A key piece of avoiding accidental plagiarism is citing your sources. Citing your sources is important for showing which parts of your paper are not your own work, showing respect for the people whose work it is, and showing that you've done a good job backing up your argument. And on the practical side, keeping good records of the sources you used helps you or others to find those sources for verification later.

Academic honesty is taken very seriously at the University of Maryland. The consequences of committing plagiarism may include failure of the course or even dismissal from the university.

Use these suggestions to avoid plagiarism:

  • Take complete, accurate notes about where you find ideas, quotations, etc. Write down the full citation for each source (including the name of the database where you found it, for journal articles).
  • Use quotation marks when using an author's exact words and cite the source of the quotation. Even if you paraphrase an author, you still need to give proper acknowledgement.
  • For longer research papers, consider using a bibliographic citation manager, specialized software to help you keep track of your research sources.
  • Use proper citation styles in the text of your paper and bibliography.

More reading on citing sources in general and other citation styles:

UMD Libraries: Citation Tools Links to an external site.
This page will give you general information on how and why to cite.

Citations provide the information necessary to specifically identify and locate the sources you used. Citation styles are discipline-specific ways of formatting those citations. It is important to learn and use the citation style of the discipline you're writing for.