BLOG # 8: Difficulties in Citing Sources

Along the course of a student’s life, one of the most frequent reminders that we hear is that plagiarism is against school rules, or the rules of morality for that matter. When using another author’s work, it is essential that you properly cite your source. Giving credit not only benefits your credibility as an author, but will also help you avoid plagiarism. But what is plagiarism and why is it deemed to be an unethical action?

In simple terms, committing plagiarism means representing someone else’s ideas, thoughts or words as your own. People plagiarize when they do not give credit to someone else’s “intellectual property” by omitting citations and references.

The consequences for plagiarism can be severe. For example, you could receive a grade of 75 in your research subject if you forget to include proper citation in your paper. Worse, one could be subjected to intellectual property theft or copyright infringement. For what it’s worth, the ideas generated by one’s mind is a product of his/her wits and creativity. Stealing these ideas would be unfair as well as unethical.

To avoid being accused of plagiarism, you need to give credit to the concepts, facts, ideas and words you find from other sources and use in your papers. You give credit by properly using quotations or paraphrases and always providing correct citation and reference information whenever you do so. The importance of properly citing sources in an intellectual paper is essential because of the succeeding reasons.

One of the biggest mistakes we make as student writers is that we tend to think the writer of the text we are reading as authoring all the ideas contained in it, but just like we use sources to support our arguments and ideas, we need to give credits to those people whom we borrowed our ideas from. Attributing information and ideas to the correct scholars is important, and training ourselves to recognize and properly acknowledge the sources of our material relies us.

Another common mistake is that we fail to differentiate the citation styles and use them appropriately.

There are multiple formats for citation styles, and they vary according to academic discipline. The Modern Language Association (MLA) has a specific format for citation information that is to be included both in-text and on a Works Cited page. This format is used for English and some other humanities courses and includes stylistic conventions for the format of the essay as well as for the citations.

Similarly, the American Psychological Association (APA) has its own form of citation and formatting that is most often utilized by courses in the social sciences. Yet another style of citation is the Chicago Manual of Style, which is often used in research papers for history and some humanities courses.

Knowing the differences of each style has really helped me a lot in overcoming my difficulties in citing sources. After our teacher briefly discussed about these, and after giving a lot of examples, I must say that I can easily cite sources in the upcoming research paper that we will have. Moreover, I can use this knowledge further in making our thesis paper upon stepping into the tertiary level of education.