Students’ Frequently Asked Questions about Citation

Perhaps, but not necessarily. Citation can be incorrect but not violate academic honesty policy or principles. For example, if you don’t italicize the book or journal title in your APA style in-text citation, or you add the state following the city in a Chicago-style footnote, these are errors in implementing citation rules which won’t cause a student to appear before the Committee on Academic Standing. However, these errors may result in a lowered grade on the assignment if citation accuracy is part of your assignment grading rubric.

Citing means acknowledging the source of the idea and indicating its location so your reader can consult that work. Quoting refers to using the exact words of another source in your writing. When you quote, you must use quotation marks or indention to indicate that the words are not yours, and you must also cite the source. Thus, any quotation requires a citation, but you will have many citations for material that you won’t quote directly.

Place quotation marks around any quotation you use in your text, including full sentences, parts of sentences, and short phrases. Even single words must be surrounded by quotation marks when the author has used a word in a unique way, reflecting that author’s special contribution to the discussion of the topic. Treat quotations that exceed four lines of type as block quotations, in which you indent the quoted material and omit quotation marks.

In each of your classes, your instructor will tell you which citation style is supposed to be used for all writing in that class. If the instructor does not tell you, be sure to ask before you turn in any written work that cites others’ work. If you are publishing a literary work or a research report in a journal, the editor will tell you which citation style to use. The principle to keep in mind is that each format has particular rules, and you need to follow those rules with care.

Differences in citation styles reflect very real, practical differences in the writing styles in various disciplines and the evolution of different citation traditions within the disciplines. For example, historians use endnotes instead of in-text, parenthetical citations because citations in historical writing often include more than the direct source; they offer, as well, paragraph-long discussions of different sources’ views on the matter under discussion. In other disciplines, such discussions of the literature in the field would be included in the text itself.

In your classes, you are expected to employ the citation style appropriate to its discipline, so you may be using three or four different styles in one semester, depending on your course selection. The syllabus for each course should indicate which citation style is expected for assignments. Attention to differences in citation formats and accuracy in using each format is part of your liberal arts education and will prepare you for employers’ and publishers’ different citation expectations when you leave Grinnell.

Common knowledge is information so well-known and uncontroversial it needs no source. For example, if you are writing about the arrival of Columbus at the North American continent, you could assume that the basic facts of this event are common knowledge. However, when you discuss the interpretation of the event, for example, whether Columbus was engaging in a voyage of discovery or a colonizing effort or some amalgam of the two, you need to cite your sources unless the interpretation is clearly your own.

Pay attention to sources as part of your reading process. As you study course material, particularly in introductory courses, think about whether a view is expressed by several writers, whether it is described as common in the literature, or whether it seems to be attributed to one person.

Generally, introductory courses explain the assumptions of disciplines; that is, they reveal both the discipline’s arguments and its fault lines, what is common knowledge and what is not. As you learn more about the discipline and the questions it explores, you should begin to understand better what that discipline commonly understands and accepts. In sum, the way to understand what is common knowledge is to read carefully, listen attentively, and reason clearly.

No, it does not follow. You must cite everything except common knowledge.

The terms public domain and share alike refer to the copyright status of materials. Works in the public domain are not subject to proprietary interests, that is, they are not subject to a copyright or a patent; works licensed as share alike are covered by a copyright that allows users to share and share alike and restricts them to using a similar license when using materials from that source. However, when you are citing such sources in an academic context, usually you are concerned not with the copyright status of a text but with giving your reader an accurate idea of what sources have contributed to your work. Therefore, whether or not a work is in the public domain or is licensed share alike, you need to cite your source.

“Open source” refers to a movement, begun in the computer field, to allow users to make changes to software; a parallel movement, “open content,” is best exemplified by Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which anyone may edit (note that this procedure may affect its reliability as well). Despite the openness of the names, if you use information from Wikipedia in your academic papers, you still have an obligation to cite it (though Wikipedia is not usually considered to be a scholarly source).

Different styles of citation (MLA, APA, etc.) require different uses of quotation marks, indentation, and citation for entire blocks of text. Follow these rules closely. Additionally, however, you should cite the source as often as you need to in order to make clear to your reader where the material comes from and whose idea it is. Think about being the reader of such a paragraph or set of paragraphs. How often would you have to see a citation to know what the source of each statement is? Where would you as a reader like to have guideposts as to whose idea you are reading? The answer is probably more often than just at the end of a paragraph or a set of paragraphs. Think about a reader asking constantly, “Whose idea is this?” Then arrange your citations to answer that question.

Keep in mind that, if you put an idea from another source in the middle of those of an author, you must make clear to the reader whose ideas are whose. It’s a good idea to make clear syntactic differentiations between the sentences that represent the ideas of sources; that is, acknowledge a source at both the beginning and the end of the section taken from it.

The short answer to this question is yes. Be sure to follow the specific citation style (e.g., MLA, CMOS) rules for citing Internet sources. Also, for a quoted passage of this length, follow the rules for block quotations.

The long answer is that if you cite this much material from another source, you may indicate to your instructor that you are careless or not invested as a writer. An effective writer actively digests, analyzes, condenses, expands, assesses, and/or adds to what they find in other texts. Rather than simply dropping a long quotation into a paper, think about how to interpret, analyze, or paraphrase it instead — and then cite the source for contributing to your knowledge.

Course policies vary in whether students are permitted (or required) to use AI tools. Regardless, use of ChatGPT, other LLMs, or any generative AI tool needs to be cited and/or acknowledged. Consult your course instructor or an instructor in the Writing Center if you need guidance, and then follow the citation format that you are using in your assignment.

Some disciplines focus on language; others do not. For example, if you are writing a paper for an English course, chances are you are analyzing a particular use of language. Therefore, you will need to quote at least the piece of language under analysis.

On the other hand, if you are surveying previous research for a biology research project, chances are you will spend your time paraphrasing the findings, using few or no direct quotations, although you will of course cite your sources.

If you published an idea previously (and in this context submitting a paper for a class may be considered publishing), then you should cite yourself when you use the same idea in a later paper.

Citing class should be reserved for matters that uniquely arise out of the classroom, such as a thoughtful point made by a student that you wish to reiterate (this applies to a comment made in class or on a discussion board). However, before you cite class, first consider whether the matter you wish to cite came out of a reading or other materials assigned to you by your professor. In general, you should be citing the original source material rather than a professor's explanation of it.

In general, conversations are acknowledged rather than cited. There are, however, rare times when you may need to cite a conversation because you draw upon an idea or evidence that you end up incorporating into your work in a significant way. What constitutes “significant” can be very nuanced, so students are encouraged to speak with their instructor for advice on when citation is necessary.

In most cases, conversations about student work fit the definition of “personal assistance” that should be acknowledged, but not formally cited, as explained by David Becker in the APA Style Blog:

Personal assistance encompasses individuals whose work may not warrant authorship credit—that is, they didn’t do any actual writing or make significant scientific contributions...—but their assistance was nonetheless valuable and deserving of some form of credit. Maybe you would like to thank some students who helped recruit research participants and collect data, or perhaps a couple [of] friends and colleagues who took some time out of their busy schedules to proofread the first draft of your manuscript before you submitted it for publication.

If an instructor, Writing Mentor, or classmate helped with your writing process or helped you think through an idea, consider creating an acknowledgments section in which you give them credit for that help. APA and Chicago styles specify placement and formatting for an acknowledgments section.

If you're not sure what wording to use for your acknowledgments, we suggest using one of these templates; replace the [brackets] with the information that applies to your paper.

[Name] provided feedback and advice on a draft of this paper.

Thanks to [name], who [helped with brainstorming, provided feedback on the argument, explained strategies for writing conclusions].