YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACCURACY OF YOUR CITATIONS!
Material provided is only intended as a guide. If you professor's instructions vary from this guide, please follow the guidance of your professor.
When a professor requires you to cite your sources for a research assignment using APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian, you may have questions about what that really means. Citing or referencing your sources is a standardized way to inform your readers that specific information in your work is from an outside source so that the reader can find that source again.
A citation should include general information such as:
A citation is required:
Each of these instances requires an in-text citation.
You don't have to cite:
When in doubt, be safe and cite your source!
A complete citation or reference is made up of two parts:
Include an in-text citation when you refer to facts, summarize, paraphrase, or quote from another source.
An in-text citation is one half of a complete citation. It is the brief form of the reference that you include in the body of your work that gives enough information to uniquely identify the source in your reference list. For every in-text citation in your paper, there must be a corresponding entry in your reference list to make a complete citation.
The format of both the in-text citation and full reference entry depends on the citation style your professor asked you to use. See Popular Citation Styles used at Midlands Technical College.
It is important for writers to cite sources:
At Midlands Technical College, the most commonly used citation styles are APA, MLA, and Turabian.
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| For psychology, education, and other social sciences | For literature, arts, and humanities | For history and business |
Need help with legal citations?
Check out Cornell University Law School's Introduction to Basic Legal Citation Guide.
When you neglect to recognize the work of others and do not appropriately cite your sources, plagiarism can occur.
Plagiarism is defined by The Student Code for Midlands Technical College in this way:
"'Plagiarism' is defined as the appropriation of any other person’s work and the unacknowledged incorporation of that work in one’s own work." -p. 61 of the MTC Student Handbook
Plagiarism may be:
Check out MTC Library's Preventing Plagiarism Tutorial if you are interested in learning more about avoiding plagiarism in your work.
This guide was created by Erica Huff with excerpts from CSUDH University Library's Citation Guide used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
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