3.5: Documenting Sources in APA, MLA, or IEEE Styles
3.5: Documenting Sources in APA, MLA, or IEEE Styles
Learning Objectives
6. ENL1813 Course Learning Requirement 6: Integrate and document information using commonly accepted citation guidelines.
i. Credit other’s work or ideas to avoid plagiarism (ENL1813B CLR 6.1)
ii. Incorporate research information in written materials and oral messages (ENL1813B CLR 6.2)
iii. Use strategies to identify and avoid plagiarism (ENL1813B CLR 6.3)
iv. Identify acceptable citation guidelines (ENL1813B CLR 6.4)
v. Cite sources correctly using APA style (ENL1813B CLR 6.5)
To prove formally that we’ve done research, we use a two-part system for documenting sources. The first part is a citation that gives a few brief pieces of information about the source right where that source is used in our document and points to the second part, the bibliographic reference at the end of the document. This second part gives further details about the source so that readers can easily retrieve it themselves. Though documenting research requires a little more effort than not, it looks so much better than including research in a document without showing where you got it, which is called plagiarism. Before focusing further on how to document sources, it’s worthwhile considering why we do it and what exactly is wrong with plagiarism.
- 3.5.1: Academic Integrity vs. Plagiarism
- 3.5.2: Citing and Referencing in APA Style
- 3.5.3: Citing and Referencing in MLA Style
- 3.5.4: Citing and Referencing in IEEE Style
- 3.5.5: Citing Images and Other Media
3.5.1: Academic Integrity vs. Plagiarism
Academic integrity basically means that you do your work yourself and formally credit your sources when you use research, whereas plagiarism is cheating. Students often plagiarize by stealing the work of others from the internet (e.g., copying and pasting text, or dragging and dropping images), including cheating sites like Course Hero and generative AI such as ChatGPT, and dumping it into an assignment without quoting or citing; putting their name on that assignment means that they’ve dishonestly presented someone else’s work as their own. Lesser violations involve not quoting or citing properly. But why would anyone try to pull one over on their instructor like this when instructors award points for doing research? If you’re going to do your homework, you might as well do it right by finding credible sources, documenting them, and getting credit for doing so rather than sneak your research in as if you’ll get points for originality, for coming up with professional-grade material yourself, and end up getting penalized for it. But what makes plagiarism so wrong?
Plagiarism is theft, and bad habits of stealing others’ work in school likely begin as liberal attitudes towards intellectual property in our personal lives, but often develop into more serious crimes of copyright or patent violations in professional situations with equally serious financial penalties or destruction of reputations and earning power