Citations

Welcome to the Citations page. This guide is designed to help you cite all types of sources.

Use the navigation tabs on the left to help you during your research.

A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and avoid plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author's name, date, location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting. Commonly used styles include American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA) and Chicago.   

Citing or documenting the sources used in your research serves two purposes: (1) it gives proper credit to the authors of the materials you used, and (2) it allows those who are reading your work to locate the sources that you have listed as references.

Representing the work of others as your own is plagiarism. See Texas Lutheran University's discussion of "Academic Honesty & Plagiarism" (Student Handbook, p. 6). 

Use a standard bibliographic citation style approved by your instructor. 

You need to cite your sources whenever you:

• Quote a sentence or passage

• Paraphrase or summarize ideas that are not your own

• Make specific reference to the work of others

• Utilize data, statistics, music and images

You do NOT need to cite:

• Well-known and undisputed facts (refer to style guides)

• Your own ideas expressed elsewhere in the same paper

Cite all the sources that you used. In other words, cite what you have seen and used. To cite a work that you have not seen or used is dishonest and can perpetuate inaccuracies. View the original sources because other, secondary authors may have misrepresented quotes, statistics, ideas or meaning from an original source. Beware of AI-generated hallucinations of citations.

You must cite:

• Facts, figures, ideas, or other information that is not common knowledge
• Ideas, words, theories, or exact language that another person used in other publications
• Publications that must be cited include:  books, book chapters, articles, web pages, theses, etc.
• Another person's exact words should be quoted and cited to show proper credit 
• Other creators' images, music, videos, art, and social media

When in doubt, be safe and cite your source.

The purpose is to provide enough information for the reader to easily find the sources you used.  The information included in the citation depends upon the type of sources as well as the citation style.  Here are some basic guidelines.

Almost all citations include:

• Author(s) and/or editor(s)
• Title of the chapter or article
• Title of the book or journal
• Year of publication

In addition to the information above, citations for books or book chapters include:

• Place of publication
• Publisher
• Pages of chapter (if applicable)

In addition to the information above, citations for journal articles include:

• Volume
• Issue
• Pages of article

Some styles also require either Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or URLS.