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Hey there! Ready to learn how to give credit to other writers and use source materials ethically?
When you write a research paper, you use facts and ideas from other authors. Giving those authors credit is called academic citation. Doing this shows respect for their hard work and helps your readers find the original information.
If you do not cite your sources, it is called plagiarism, which means using someone else's words or ideas as your own. To avoid this, we use clear citations to show exactly where our borrowed ideas came from.
An ethical researcher connects every borrowed quote or paraphrased idea directly to its source. We do this by placing a short citation right inside our paragraph, which points to a full list of sources at the very end of our paper.
Imagine you are writing a report on space exploration. You find this sentence in a book by Dr. Mae Jemison published in 2016: "The stars are within our reach if we work together." Show how you would ethically use this quote in your paper.
- Identify the author (Mae Jemison) and the year the book was published (2016).
- Write your own introductory sentence to give context to the quote.
- Place Dr. Jemison's exact words inside quotation marks so the reader knows they are not your own words.
- Add an in-text citation at the end of the sentence containing the author's last name and the year: (Jemison, 2016).
- Combine them: Dr. Jemison believes in teamwork, stating, "The stars are within our reach if we work together" (Jemison, 2016).
