Citations: Quick and Dirty

What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is claiming someone elses idea or work for your own. In colleges, this
is not tolerated. Most will simply expel you. Professors can easily spot plagiarism
and are aware of the canned paper available online.
What are citations?
Citations are a method to attribute someone else for their idea or work. There are
2 major formats used in colleges: APA (American Psychological Association) and
MLA (Modern Language Association). Citations are also cool for helping you find
reference sources.
Bibliographies at the end of papers can help you save time searching. You can
use the author and title information to look up the articles. Even cooler: some
citations include DOI Digital Object Identifier. Basically, it works like a permalink
in a blog. Paste the gooblygook (it looks something like this:
10.1017/S0021911806001148) into the search box at http://www.doi.org/ and off
you go. No wasted time hunting around.
When do I use these citation thingies?
You use citations whenever the thought is not your own. Yes, it is that simple.
Quoting an author is an obvious time to cite a work, but you must also cite a work
whenever you paraphrase it or use any bit of information (no matter how small)
from that work. If it is not your own, original thought or understanding, you must
use a citation.
Plagiarism is serious in college. It can (and will!) get you thrown out. At the very
least, you will fail your assignment. Besides, plagiarism is brain dead simple to
avoid so why take the risk?
Google and Wikipedia dont cut it in college. Professors demand academic
resources. It is vital to understand how to read citations. So here is the quick and
dirty thanks to Purdue Owl (Russel, 2014; Paiz, 2013). Look what I did there!
How to cite stuff
There are many different rules for citing different types of stuff audio, books,
websites, and other formats. However, they follow a basic format.
Here is MLA for a book (Russel, 2014):
Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher,
Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
And APA for a periodical (Paiz, 2013):
Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of
article. Title o Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages.
http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy
Why have different citations?
APA is used for scientific papers. Science is concerned about dates and uses
academic journals more than books. All the extra information helps you find the
academic journal online. You can quickly search for the volume and issue number
of the journal.
These are the basic formats. If you need to know how to cite something specific,
like a website, check out Purdue OWL (You can find the citations at the end of the
handout). It is my go-to for citation how-tos.
In Text Citation
Both MLA and APA use parenthetical citations. Parentheses are used to house the
citation information, in other words. In APA, you need to cite the author(s) last
names and the year (Paiz, 2013). Yep, like that. Unless you write something like
this:
According to Paiz (2013), you need.
So, the short of it: with-in text citation APA you need the authors last name(s)
and the date
MLA citations use the page number (if a book) instead of the date. Otherwise, it
works the same way. So again, the authors last name and the page number must
be used in the citation.
Search Tip
These general search tips work for Google and academic/library databases. The
easiest way to use a citation to find anything is this:
Authors last name title of work
Quotations tell search engines to only search for all the stuff between the
quotation marks. Otherwise, you will get results for all the words. Now, Google is
fairly good at guessing what you mean, but academic/library databases are not.
They use a different organization system. This little tip will save you hours of
headaches.
References (in APA format)
(Always list the sources in alphabetical order. Notice the hanging indent? It helps
you see the first last name.)
Protip: Type out the citations in any order, select all of them, and then use
Words sort function to alphabetize by paragraph.
Cook, C. (1985). Line by line: how to edit your own writing. New York: Houghton
Mifflin Harcout.
Paiz, J., Angeli, E., Wagner, J., Lawrick, E., Moore, K,Keck, R. (2013). Reference
list: articles in periodicals. Purdue OWL. Retrieved September 29, 2014
from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/07/.
Russel, T., Brizee, A., Angeli,E ., Keck, R., Paiz, J. (2014). MLA works cited page:
books. Retrieved September 29, 2014 from
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/.