Finding, Using and Citing Images

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.   

You must cite images as sources in your work just as you would for articles, books or other resources in order to avoid plagiarism.  Additionally, you should have captions for the images to address copyright issues. You will need to gather information about the images to create a caption.  Those include T-A-S-L (Title, Author, Source, License).

Title - (if there is one) and the link to the source page

• Not all images will have a title. If yours does not, create a brief description of what the image is. Ex: Photo of a squirrel
• The link for the source page is not a page with search results (such as a Google link). Rather, it is the page on which the image resides.

Author name - and link to the author's profile page (if there is one)

• Not all images have the author(s) listed. If yours does not, you can still use the image without giving an author name.

Source name - and link (if not already gathered with the title)

License - Creative Commons designation and link to CC details

You can use the Open Attribution Builder to help you create the caption.