Citation Guide

• To acknowledge or give credit to the person whose work you quoted, paraphrased, or summarized
• To allow readers to find your sources
• To provide evidence to support your argument
• To avoid plagiarizing
• To let your professor know that you did your research
• To participate in the academic conversation on your topic

Cite your source when you are quoting, paraphrasing, or just referencing any of the following:

• Anyone else's articulated ideas, arguments, opinions, or experiences.
• Any artwork, pictures, videos, or other creative works produced by others.
• Direct quotations of any words written or spoken by others.
• Unique phrases or terms coined by others.
• Data, statistics, or facts produced or documented by others.
• Published research details and results, whether conducted by you or others.

According to the Purdue OWL, you do not need to cite for purposes of credit when:

• You are writing about your own lived experiences, your own observations and insights, your own thoughts, and your own conclusions about a subject
• You are writing up your own results obtained through lab or field experiments
• You use your own artwork, digital photographs, video, audio, etc.
• You are using "common knowledge".  This can be a little tricky, but a general rule of thumb is: If the majority of people already know the information, then it is "common knowledge".
• You are using generally-accepted facts, e.g., pollution is bad for the environment, including facts that are accepted within particular discourse communities, e.g., in the field of composition studies, "writing is a process" is a generally-accepted fact.
• You find the same information not documented in five or more authoritative sources.

A citation usually has 2 parts:

• An in-text or parenthetical citation, which appears within the text of your paper, immediately following a direct quote or paraphrased text.
• A corresponding citation in the works cited or bibliography, which provides detailed information about the source