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MEM Guide for Finding, Using and Citing Sources

Avoiding plagiarism

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!

Anatomy of a citation

Many publications in the environmental sciences use the Council of Science Editors (CSE) citation style. Here is how to cite three major reference types using this style.

Color-coded examples of CSE citations for journals, book chapters, and book reference types.

Environmental sciences citation styles

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 these great quick-start guides for each of these styles:

Citation management tools

Citation tools allow you to save and organize your research. They also let you create formatted bibliographies in Word.

Endnote product logo

Downloadable as a standalone program from OIT, EndNote is a powerful citation tool for organizing your research and creating formatted citations. In addition to the standalone option, you can create an EndNote Web account.

This feature will look for and then download full-text PDFs of articles in your references. You will have to authenticate with your NetID so that EndNote knows which journals you can access through Duke Libraries.

  1. Get to your preferences by going to Edit > Preferences
  2. Choose Find Full Text
  3. Make sure OpenURL is checked and enter https://duke.userservices.exlibrisgroup.com/openurl/01DUKE_INST/01DUKE_INST:Services into the OpenURL Path field
  4. Enter https://login.proxy.lib.duke.edu/login?url= into the Authenticate URL field
  5. Click OK

Zotero product logo

Downloadable as a standalone program or a Firefox extension, Zotero is designed to store content in any format, including PDFs, images, audio and video files, and snapshots of web pages. Zotero operates with thousands of sites, and automatically indexes your library for ease of access. Zotero is open access (free!).