Why Should I Cite My Resources?
Why cite resources?
- Citations allow readers to locate and further explore the sources you used to develop your thoughts and outcomes expressed in your paper. They are a measure of the depth and scope of your research.
- Citations are the method used to give credit to authors for their ideas and research.
- Citations provide the evidence for your arguments and establish your credibility by documenting that you have searched for and considered a number of resources during researching and writing of your paper.
- Citing enable you to have your own original ideas and outcomes standout from the other's research.
- Citing is standard practice in the world of academia.
What is a citation?
A citation is a way you inform the readers that certain materials in your paper came from another source. It also gives your readers the information necessary to find the source. Your citation should include the following elements in both your footnotes and bibliography.
- Author
- Title of work
- Place of publication
- Publisher
- Date published
- Page numbers where the material is located.
When do I need to cite?
You need to acknowledge whenever you borrow quotes or ideas. The following are when you need to cite:
- Whenever you use direct quotes.
- Whenever you paraphrase.
- Whenever you use an idea that someone else has already expressed.
- Whenever you make specific reference to the work of another.
- Whenever someone else's work has been critical in developing your own ideas.
Citation Resources
Historians most commonly use Chicago’s note-style citation, based in the Chicago Manual of Style, now in its 17th ed. (U of Chicago, 2017). Notes (either footnotes or endnotes) are the single most flexible and broadly-applicable form of documentation available to academic writers. Below you will find resources to assist with your citations.
- Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (Purdue Owl)The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) covers a variety of topics from manuscript preparation and publication to grammar, usage, and documentation, and as such, it has been lovingly dubbed the “editor's bible.”
- Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press)This seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has been prepared with an eye toward how we find, create, and cite information that readers are as likely to access from their pockets as from a bookshelf. It offers updated guidelines on electronic workflows and publication formats, tools for PDF annotation and citation management, web accessibility standards, and effective use of metadata, abstracts, and keywords.
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