Maysville CTC English 101 Research Tutorial: Cite Sources

Why cite?

All of the following conditions are considered plagiarism:

• turning in someone else's work as your own
• copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
• giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see "fair use" rules)

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Online:
"plagiarism is the act of taking the writings of another person and passing them off as one's own. The fraudulence is closely related to forgery and piracy—practices generally in violation of copyright laws." It is considered plagiarism when you use another author's work and do not provide a citation or give credit otherwise!

Find out more about Plagiarism at Plagiarism.org

According to the MLA website, "All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines."

Which style to use for formating citations may depend on your field of study.  Both the MLA and APA styles are just different ways to arrange the citation information for materials used from various sources.