Citing Sources

After you have completed the Citing Sources module you will:

• Understand what a citation is and what it includes
• Understand the importance of providing a complete citation for others' works
• Know where to find tools that will help you prepare your citation in the required format for BMZ 115/116 or other classes

Plagiarism is the stealing or passing-off of the ideas of others as one’s own, or the use of other’s works without crediting the source (definition from Webster’s Dicitonary, Online Edition).

Plagiarism is considered an act of Academic Misconduct by Miami University (click here to see the university policy). While some forms of plagiarism are deliberate and flagrant, others are not so obvious!

Forms of plagiarism include:

• Submitting the work of someone else as one’s own
• Copying portions of a work (copy and paste from a webpage) without attributing credit to the source
• Summarizing the ideas of others without crediting them
• Using the words of others without quoting them
• Borrowing too much from a source when summarizing

Plagiarism doesn’t just apply to papers and lab reports…all of these are also examples of plagiarism!

• Using someone else’s powerpoint and changing a few words or the background
• Using images from the web in your creation, even if you embellish the image (without crediting the source)
• Submitting video footage that another person created, with a few changes to make it “your own” (again, without crediting the source).

• Write down the complete citation information for each item you use
• Take good notes about where you found specific ideas
• Use quotation marks if you are including exact phrases from another's work
• Always credit original authors for their ideas, even if you have paraphrased
• If you use multimedia items, check their policy. Look for non-copyrighted or public domain images.

Citing is the process of giving credit to the sources you used to write your lab report or research paper or other assignment.

It is a brief description of the item from which you took an idea or a quote. It must include enough information to locate the item.

A citation is made up of many parts. Which parts to include and in what order and with what punctuation is all governed by the FORMAT (or STYLE) that you are using.

The format or style you will use for BMZ 115 is the American Psychological Association format, published in detail in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.

Below is an example citation, in APA format, from the scholarly journal Canadian Journal of Zoology.

There are 2 important reasons to cite your sources:

1. To avoid plagiarism by giving credit to the original source
2. To provide complete information for locating the source material you used in your research

Yes, there are some occasions when no citation is needed:

1. If you use your own experiences and ideas
2. If you use generally accepted facts or common knowledge (Columbus discovered America in 1492, for example).
3. When writing the experimental results for a lab report (you still need to cite other sources you consult for the literature review and protocol!)

Learn about the Tools you can use.