As we mentioned above, your essay will be a mix of your own ideas, information f
As we mentioned above, your essay will be a mix of your own ideas, information from your research sources, and your responses to or analysis of the information from your sources. You have to cite the information from your research sources so that your reader doesn’t think you’re taking the work and presenting it as your own. But figuring out exactly when a citation is needed can still be difficult. It gets easier with practice. The Decision Tree below shows you the key questions to ask yourself about how you are using research sources so that you can cite appropriately.
Deciding When a Citation is Needed
Review this decision chart that is designed to help you decide when you have to include a citation in your writing. We recommend saving this chart, if possible, so that you can check it when you are writing your outline with citations and when you are drafting your essay. A second copy of the decision chart is included in the Appendix in the section titled “Citing Sources Decision Chart”, so you can easily tear it out and keep it with your papers.
The text version of The Steps to Avoiding Plagiarism is in the Appendix.
As professor of writing Rebecca Moore Howard explains to students to help protect them from being accused of plagiarism, “When in doubt, cite; over-citation is an error, but under-citation is plagiarism” (800).
What about “Common Knowledge?” If you have been taught about citing sources and avoiding plagiarism in the past, you may have heard the term “common knowledge” and you might have been told that you shouldn’t cite something if it’s common knowledge.
Common knowledge is usually defined as the set of knowledge (not opinions or beliefs) that most educated people share. But in reality we all belong to different knowledge communities and there may be common knowledge that is shared by most people within your community that even smart, wise, or educated people outside of your community do not know. For example, people who belong to the same religion will have common knowledge about the holy books of their religion but may not know about the holy books of other religions or about the foundational books in biology or physics. And a community of physicists share common knowledge with each other about the laws of thermodynamics and famous physics experiments but they may not know about holy books that religious people know about and they also may not know how bills become laws the way that political scientists would know it. We could make an infinitely long list of all of the things that some people consider common knowledge and that other people do not know.
So calling something “common knowledge” usually means you’re forgetting how many people are outside of the community that shares that knowledge. Citing a source that taught you something new or gave you a new idea, even if you think that the information you got from it could be considered common knowledge by other people, is also a way to be extra sure no one will think that you p