Using, Citing, and Acknowledging Sources

Academic Honesty Guide > Part II: Principles of Citation > Section 2: Using, Citing, and Acknowledging Sources

We can legitimately incorporate others’ work into our own work in various ways. In the “Using Sources” section, we describe methods you might use in writing an academic paper in order to incorporate others’ work into your own work: paraphrasing; summarizing; direct quotation, block quotation and snippets; and drawing on an idea or argument. In “Citation Styles,” we explain a selection of styles and where to learn about them. In “Citation Elements,” we explain the information you need to look for in order to cite correctly. In “Citing Sources,” we offer examples of citations in three formats scholars use in their citations of others’ work: American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS or Chicago). And in “Citation Generators,” we offer advice about how to use tools that claim to make the citation process easier.

Using Sources

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing an author’s work, such as a speech or short story or journal article, requires that you put into your own words the key ideas, evidence, or arguments that you are drawing upon from that original work. Unlike quoting a source—in which you incorporate the exact language of the author, putting those words in either quotation marks or set off in block format (see below)—paraphrasing invites more flexibility in terms of scope and emphasis. This flexibility can be extremely useful because you might want to make a point in more condensed language than the original text, or to translate the central insights of a passage into more universal terms, so that it fits more seamlessly with the specific focus of your project. Paraphrasing also allows you to bring together multiple points that might be spread out across different sections of a text and therefore difficult to quote directly or succinctly. Keep in mind, however, that the fundamental point of paraphrasing is to introduce and acknowledge the particular ideas, evidence, or arguments you are drawing upon. So, you must put a citation at the end of any sentence/s that paraphrase another’s work. Doing so provides an important source of acknowledgment and a signpost for your audience.

Summarizing

Summarizing, like paraphrasing, involves incorporating another person’s ideas, evidence, or arguments into your own work by rephrasing the text (as opposed to directly quoting the source, verbatim, i.e., word for word). The citation practices for both paraphrasing and summarizing, moreover, are the same. The difference between the two lies in an expectation of scope and inclusiveness. When one “summarizes” a text, the aim is to provide a more comprehensive review of that work, including all of its main points or arguments. To summarize an article on the molecular structure of a particular protein, for example, would oblige the writer to explain (in their own condensed language) the essential research question, methodology, evidence, and findings of the piece; a writer who is paraphrasing that same article is not trying to capture all of these key elements and is therefore free to discuss only those particular ideas or arguments they want to discuss. In other words, summarizing and paraphrasing have fundamentally different goals and purposes, so you should be attentive in your particular class assignments to whether the professor wants you to provide more comprehensive summaries of particular texts, or to focus more on paraphrasing and selectively drawing upon the sources to develop your own points.

Quoting

Quoting is the most familiar way we incorporate others’ work into our own. We are quoting an author whenever we use that author’s exact phrasing word for word or verbatim. Quoting is perfectly legitimate as long as you identify who authored the words you are quoting and cite the author and the text.

Block quotes are verbatim quotes that typically exceed three or four lines of regular type. In those instances, you literally turn the long quote into a “block” by indenting it.
Snippets are quotations consisting of just a few words from a source. You might construct a paragraph (or a whole paper) analyzing a politician’s speech in which you incorporate short phrases – snippets – from the speech into your own sentences, making sure to put quotation marks around each snippet, and then cite each one.

A cautionary note about using quotations: While academic honesty governs the ethical use of sources and acknowledgments, individual disciplines or research fields may have their own rhetorical and scholarly conventions about the proper balance between quotations and paraphrasing. So, while it might be ethical to submit a paper in which 90% of the text is direct quotations from other sources, the professor might critique the paper for failing to develop one’s own ideas, interpretation, or analysis. A paper for an English class, in which students are asked to develop arguments based on the specific language used in texts might quote sources more often than a chemistry class, where the professor wants to see that students can “digest” complex findings from articles into succinct, paraphrased statements (rather than relying upon direct quotations). In other words, understanding how to effectively paraphrase, summarize, and quote other sources provides an ethical baseline for participating in the world of academic life; but learning to develop effective arguments within different academic fields requires you to go beyond these ethical precepts to learn how and why particular fields value a certain balance between different modes of engaging other sources and highlighting one’s own arguments.

Drawing on an Idea or Argument

Drawing on an idea or argument is the most common way we incorporate another person’s work into our own work, but it is often the most overlooked. It is in the nature of all scholarship to build on the ideas and arguments others have made; we all aim to be inspired by others’ ideas, and we often write in response to others’ writing. Even when you don’t paraphrase, summarize, or quote from a source that directly informed your thinking, you should cite that source. This is your way of showing your reader where your thinking fits into the whole literature on a topic; you present a more mature image of yourself as a scholar when your citations show the breadth of sources that shaped your thinking on your subject.

Your tutorial professor will give you writing assignments that encourage you to practice each of these different ways of legitimately incorporating others’ words and ideas into your own writing. In those assignments, you will be asked to pay close attention to citation methods and formats. The following section is intended to assist with that process.

Citation Styles

As you will discover in your reading and writing for different courses at Grinnell, there are many formats for citing sources, and different disciplines use different styles. Some scientists and many social scientists use APA style, literary analysts typically use MLA, and historians most often use Chicago/CMOS. And those are only the three most common formats. These style guides change over time and are frequently updated. The examples in this section are based on the 7^th edition of the APA manual, the 9^th edition of the MLA manual, and the 17^th edition of CMOS.

Your instructors may specify a particular style that they wish you to use, choose to have you follow a different citation format than those outlined in APA, MLA, or CMOS, or provide you with their own style guide.

Burling Library provides a basic, one-page style guide for APA, MLA, and CMOS. Complete print guides to the current versions of each of these three styles are available on reserve at the library; ask for them at the Burling circulation desk. Burling’s online search system, PRIMO, also provides online access to CMOS, including detailed explanations of both the Author-Date system and the Notes-Bibliography system. Detailed information about all three of these styles is available online at the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) at owl.purdue.edu.

Proper citation requires time and attention, especially when first working with an unfamiliar citation style. Because many professors take correct citation format very seriously, errors may affect your grade. However, formatting errors made as part of a good faith effort to cite a source do not constitute an academic honesty violation.

Citation Elements

No matter which citation format you’re using, citing sources accurately requires you to know what kind of source you’re citing and to identify what information about the source to include in your citation.

First: what’s the source? Some types of sources seem obvious: if you’re holding a physical book in your hand, the source is clearly a book. But what kind of book? Is it a book by a single author? A collection of reprinted essays by a single author edited by someone else? A collection of essays or chapters by different people, only one of which you’re citing? Those three kinds of sources would be cited differently. And when you’re working with electronic sources accessed online, determining the type of source can be even more complicated. If you’re working with a PDF, is it an article published in a scholarly journal, a chapter of a book, a complete book? If you’re on a website, are you looking at a government document, a story from an online magazine or newspaper, an open-access academic journal? Again, all those types of sources would be cited differently. If you’re not sure what kind of source you’ve found, ask your professor or a librarian to help you identify it.

Second: where do you find the information you need to include in your citation? The author’s name is usually clear, but if the source is an essay that’s part of an edited collection, you may see both an author’s name and an editor’s name, and you need to know which is which. If you’re citing a chapter from a book written by a single author, you will generally need the book title, not the chapter title—but if it’s a chapter from an edited collection, you will need both. If the source is a journal article, the article title is probably easy to find, but you will also need the name of the journal in which it was published. If you’re citing an electronic source that you accessed through a library database such as ERIC, JSTOR, Project MUSE, ProQuest, or ScienceDirect, you may (depending on the citation style) need to include the name of that database. Citations for electronic sources may also require a permalink or a DOI (Digital Object Identifier)—a unique character string used to identify a document. Often you can find all this information on the first page of an article or the copyright page of a book. Other times you will need to gather at least some of this information from the library resources through which you accessed the source. Again, if you’re not sure how the information you have corresponds to what you need to include in your citation, ask your professor or a librarian to help you figure it out.

Citing Sources

There are significant, but sometimes subtle, differences between one citation format and another. This section will not endeavor to introduce you to all possible formats or all of the formatting rules for APA, MLA and CMOS styles. Rather, its purpose is to make you aware of some key differences in citation formats. The examples offered here are taken from the published work of Grinnell faculty members David Lopatto, William Ferguson, Erik Simpson, Sarah Purcell, and Catherine Chou.

In-Text Citations

When you use APA, MLA, or CMOS Author-Date citation formats, you provide specific information about your source material in a parenthetical statement placed directly in your text. These formats will look like this:

Example #1/APA style: Just as Lopatto (2003) finds that students doing undergraduate research value the relationships or personal interactions of that experience, so we may infer that what students value in college and university settings are interactions with people.
Example #2/MLA style: Both conditions emerge whenever workers possess firm-specific human capital – or, more generally, whenever firms face costs to replacing current employees – and workers face reemployment costs (Ferguson 527).
Example #3/MLA style: That is, Hogg’s “genre of the minstrel contest poem” was a way of showing his readers what Simpson refers to as the “underbelly of the literary marketplace” (704).

Note that the in-text citation in Example #1 gave only the year of the source’s publication. That is because the sentence itself gave the author’s name and the idea summarized in that sentence was drawn from the entire source, not just one page of the source.

By contrast, the in-text citation in Example #2 provided the author’s name because it was not mentioned in the text itself, and the citation provided a page number because that particular point came from a particular page in the source.

Finally, Example #3 gives you an example of the use of snippets and illustrates the use of only a page number in the parenthetical because Simpson, the name of the author of the source, is already mentioned in the text. The citation did not have to give a citation for Hogg because Hogg is the subject of Simpson’s work while Simpson is the source for the text quoted in Example #3.

Footnote (or Endnote) Citations

When you use the CMOS Notes-Bibliography system, you do not use parenthetical citations within your text. Instead, wherever you wish to direct your reader to your source, you provide a superscript number that takes your reader to a full citation at the bottom of that same page of text (called a “footnote”) or at the end of the paper (called an “endnote”). Either footnotes or endnotes are acceptable; some professors strongly prefer one or the other, so if the assignment instructions don’t specify, ask.

Example of CMOS Notes-Bibliography citation: “In the 1820s, Americans were in a mood to contemplate and commemorate their national past even as they defined a new course for their national future. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolutionary War, it became apparent that a world of the nineteenth century had taken the place of a very different eighteenth-century American society.”¹

Your word processing program will allow you to create this superscript reference number and automatically place the full citation at the bottom of the page or end of the paper, depending on whether you choose to insert a footnote or endnote. You should then format the citation in this way:

___________________

¹ Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 173.

References, Works Cited, and Bibliographies

Nearly all citation styles, including APA, MLA, and CMOS, include a section at the end of the paper containing a list of all the sources cited in the paper with complete bibliographic information about each source. The in-text citations in the body of the paper tell readers where to look in this list to find further information about sources. Entries are listed alphabetically by the author's last name (or, for edited collections, the editor’s last name).

The APA style manual refers to the bibliographic section as References. Here you list alphabetically all the sources you cited in the paper. Here is an example of an APA style entry:

Lopatto, D. (2003). The essential features of undergraduate research. Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, 23(3), 139–142.

In MLA style, this listing is called Works Cited, and it, too, requires that you list those sources you cited in the paper. Here is an example of an entry in MLA style:

Simpson, Erik. "Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry." ELH, vol. 71 no. 3, 2004, p. 691-718. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2004.0043.

Note the differences in these two bibliographic formats. APA makes the date of publication more prominent, in part because scientists often publish several articles on the same subject, and the key distinction is the date of publication.

The CMOS Notes-Bibliography format uses the term Bibliography for the list of sources.

Here is an example of a CMOS Notes-Bibliography entry for a book:

Purcell, Sarah J. Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

And here is an example of an entry for a journal article:

Chou, Catherine. “The Parliamentary Mind and the Mutable Constitution.” Historical Research 89, no. 245 (2016): 470-485.

Compare these examples to the note format above. In a CMOS footnote or endnote, you give the author’s first name first and last name last; in the bibliography, however, the citations are arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, so the author’s last name comes first.

Citation Generators

Online citation generators are easy to find and often easy to use: you paste in a web link or some basic information about the source you want to cite, and the website generates a citation. Some library databases, such as JSTOR, will also generate citations in common formats (including APA, MLA, and Chicago/CMOS). These powerful tools can save writers a lot of time. Unfortunately, they can also make a mess of a reference list. Discerning writers use these tools carefully and check their output thoroughly.

Our suggestions for using citation generators effectively:

Choose your tool wisely. Library databases such as JSTOR and ProQuest, which generate citations for the books and articles they host, are much more likely to produce accurate results than commercial websites like Grammarly and MyBib.
Know which citation format to choose. A professor who expects APA format will probably be unhappy with an MLA-style citation, even a correct one.
Know what kind of source you’re citing. If you tell a citation generator that a source is a website, it will cite that source as a website, even if the source is actually a journal article that you accessed online through the library.
If the generator requires you to enter information yourself, enter it correctly. If you misspell an author’s name, get a date or article title wrong, or enter “JSTOR” where the journal title should go, the citation generator cannot save you.
Once the citation is generated, check it against the information in the original style guide or another reputable source of information such as Purdue OWL. Pay particular attention to names, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and numbers. Some generators — even generally accurate ones — will mysteriously produce titles in ALL CAPS. Some will include an author’s full first name when only a first initial is called for. Others simply fail to generate accurate citations for websites and other online sources. You can fix these problems, but only if you notice them.