Why are citations important? Why is it necessary to cite?

To avoid plagiarism, you must give proper credit to all sources you use! Whenever you paraphrase or directly quote information, you must cite the sources of the information using a specific citation style. In the Education field, the most commonly used citation style is APA -- the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). The current version of the APA Manual is the 7th edition, 2019. When using APA to cite your sources, you must have a list of References at the end of your paper and corresponding in-text citations in the body of your paper.

Cleveland State University takes plagiarism very seriously. Please see The Code of Student Conduct, which defines plagiarism as "stealing and/or using the ideas or writings of another in a paper or report and claiming them as your own. This includes but is not limited to the use, by paraphrase or direct quotation, of the work of another person without full and clear acknowledgment" (p. 18). Many CSU professors require their students to use a program named Turnitin.com, which checks papers for plagiarism.

Please take the time to become familiar with APA citation style since you will use it a lot in your courses! There are many RULES to follow when citing sources in APA style, such as order of the elements, capitalization, punctuation, spacing and indents.

TIPS:

• If you do not have access to the paper APA Manual, then refer to the Citation Guides page on the Library's Virtual Reference Desk. It contains links to websites to help you format your citations. A good starting point is the Purdue OWL site.

• The Purdue OWL is an excellent website for learning about APA Citation Style. Once you access the website, explore the links to the left, including In-Text Citations: The Basics and Reference List: Basic Rules. Review the many examples for citing different formats in APA style and the rules pertaining to Authors.

• To learn more about APA style, view the Basics of APA Style Tutorial.

• You can get help formatting citations inside Research Databases. The citing help inside a research database is a good starting point, but ALWAYS double-check the references because the formatting is NOT 100% correct.

• You can use Bibliographic Software like Citation Machine or RefWorks to format your citations.

As of June 30th, 2017, the library will no longer have access to RefWorks. See the links below to explore a free alternative citation manager.