Citing Your Sources
To cite = to mention, specify, or refer
As you write your assignment or paper, you will be using information that you obtained from other sources and integrating it into your own work.
When you use someone else’s words or their ideas (or their pictures, charts, etc.) in your work, you must give credit to that author by citing the original source of the information.
If you don’t give credit to the original author, you are committing a type of literary theft called plagiarism. For more information, see the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center.
Each source that you cite in your paper will need to be listed in two ways:
- in the text or body of your paper
- Called a citation, this is a very brief mention of the original information source. Often, the in-text citation includes just the author’s last name and the date of the document.
- at the end of your paper
- Called a reference, this is a complete bibliographic description of the original source, which becomes part of a “Works Cited” list or bibliography. The reference gives the title of the original document and provides enough other information about it so that someone would be able to identify the item, if they wanted to locate and read it.
Common pieces of information needed include:
- author(s)
- title
- publication date
- page numbers
- volume number
- issue number
- publisher
- location of publication
- editor
How much and which pieces of information you need will depend on the type of resource you are citing. Additional information not included in this list may be needed as well.
Citation Styles
There are several different citation “styles”; each one has its own manual or handbook of guidelines describing the proper way to format a paper or another type of written work for publication. We will be using CBE/CSE, which is usually the preferred style for the biological sciences (in other courses or disciplines, you may have to use other styles, so always be sure to use the style required by your instructor).
As mentioned above, you will need to refer to your sources in two ways:
- in the body of your document as an in-text citation
- in the reference list at the end of your document
Some of the most common publication styles include the following:
- APA Style–established by the American Psychological Association
- MLA Style–established by the Modern Language Association
- Chicago Style–established by the University of Chicago Press
- CBE/CSE Style–established by the Council of Biology Editors (now called the Council of Science Editors) – WE WILL USE CSE IN BIO 181 & 183.