MEM Guide for Finding, Using and Citing Sources

Giving credit

• Always credit sources for words, ideas, or information from external sources.
• Guidelines from professional organizations (MLA, APA) help with proper citation (ask your professor which citation style is needed for your assignment or class).

What to credit

• Credit for words or ideas from journal articles, books, reports, etc.
• Visual materials (diagrams, illustrations, figures) and electronically-available media. You may need to seek copyright permission to reuse a figure from a journal article.
• Cite anything external to your own thoughts or experiences.

Clear cases of plagiarism

• Plagiarism includes actions like buying, stealing, or borrowing someone else’s work without proper attribution.
• Examples: Copying entire papers from the web, hiring someone to write for you, or using large sections of text without citation.
• Some actions fall into a gray area, such as closely paraphrasing without proper quotation marks or building on others’ ideas without citation.
• Professors consider intent when suspecting plagiarism.

Exceptions

• Your own experiences, observations, and conclusions don’t need documentation.
• Common knowledge (accepted facts) doesn’t always require citation.
  • What is common knowledge? If it’s widely known or easily found in credible sources, it might be common knowledge. When in doubt, cite!

Remember, giving credit is essential to academic integrity!

Each academic discipline uses its own citation style. You may be familiar with APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian. APA is widely used across the social sciences while MLA and Chicago are typically used in the humanities. The sciences, however, tend to use the citation style of their foremost professional organization. If you're not sure which citation style to use for an assignment, ask your instructor!

The most commonly used citation styles in the environmental sciences are:

Check out the style manuals for getting started with each of these styles:

A citation manager, such as EndNote or Zotero, is a great way to keep track of citations and make citing easier. EndNote is available for free while you're at Duke, while Zotero is open source.